The Hutterites in North America (review)

"We don't need another book about the Hutterites," a 30-year-old Hutterite man bluntly told the authors when they visited his colony in the course of doing research for this book (275). Fortunately, Janzen and Stanton were not persuaded. A great deal has changed in Hutterite life since the appearance of what have been the standard ethnographic accounts of these distinctive peoples of the northern plains: John Bennett's Hutterian Brethren: The Agricultural Economy and Social Organization of a Communal People (1967), John A. Hostetler's Hutterite Society (1974), and John A. Hostetler and Gertrude Huntington's The Hutterites in North America (1967) (published in George and Louise Spindlers' series, "Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology," and unfortunately the same title as the present volume). Hostetler's book was reissued in 1997 with a new preface, but the content changed rather little. Hostetler and Huntington's book was revised in 1980 and again in 1996, but the revisions were spotty. In fact, we do need a new book on the Hutterites.

The authors of the present study are an historian (Janzen) and an anthropologist (Stanton), both of whom have had extensive personal experience and interactions with Hutterites in the US and Canada over the last 25 years. The book combines historical and ethnographic information. Two of the 13 chapters deal entirely with Hutterite history prior to the recent past, and other chapters include discussion of events prior to the authors' field research. In the more ethnographic portions of the book, the authors say they sought, citing Clifford Geertz, an "actor-oriented interpretation of beliefs and conduct, which is to say the people's own understanding" (xvi). There is a slightly different feel to the historical and ethnographic portions of the book, but this did not strike me as problematic. The authors describe the book as a "collaborative effort," but indicate that Janzen is "the primary writer and researcher" (xv).

The Hutterites date their origins to the 1520s in the Tirolean region of Austria. Part of the Anabaptist movement, which also produced the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Church of the Brethren, the Hutterites alone embraced community of goods (in 1528) in imitation of the apostolic community described in Acts 3:32: "The whole group of believers was united, heart and soul; no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, as everything they owned was held in common." Although twice in their history the Hutterites faced circumstances which compelled them to abandon common property (once for over a century and once for about 60 years), it always remained their ideal, and they can justifiably claim to have lived communally longer than any other modern European population. A combination of persecution and inducements caused the Hutterites to relocate several times during their history—in turn to Moravia, Slovakia, Transylvania, Ukraine, and, finally, to the United States. Between 1874 and 1880, over 1,200 Hutterites immigrated to Dakota Territory, where two-thirds of them chose to continue the living pattern that had predominated in Ukraine and settled on private farms, becoming known as the Prairieleut. The remainder, about 425, set up three common property colonies, one by each of the affiliation groups that had readopted communal living in Ukraine shortly prior to emigrating: the Schmiedeleut, the Dariusleut, and the Lehrerleut.

By the 1940s, all the Prairieleut had given up their Hutterite identity and joined Mennonite churches, but the three communal leuts have survived to the present. Like their Amish cousins, and in contrast to some 19th century religious communal societies that discouraged or even prohibited procreation (e.g., the Shakers, the Rappites, Oneida, and Amana), the Hutterites have always been pro-natalist. A widely cited figure from the 1950s of an average of 10.4 children per married Hutterite woman helps to account for the present population of around 50,000, virtually all descended from the original 425. 97 percent of contemporary Hutterites share only 14 last names. Another distinctive feature of Hutterite life is the "branching...