An Amish Paradox: Diversity and Change in the World's Largest Amish Community (review)

For the past 25 years or so, books about the Amish have been coming out of publishing houses faster than you can say Rumspringa. The great majority of these are written for general audiences and often have a topical twist: Amish Peace: Simple Wisdom for a Complicated World (2009), Crossing Over: One Woman's Escape from Amish Life, Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish (2003)—which conveniently has a counterpart in The Gentle People: An Inside View of Amish Life (4th edition, 2010); and even, in a Shakespearean vein, Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish (2007). Then there are the offerings in the new genre of "bonnet fiction," heartwarming and faith-affirming novels about finding God and love in the context of a quaint Amish community. Nothing remotely like this effusion occurs for the other Anabaptist groups, the equally interesting Mennonites and Hutterites, who are probably happy to be left alone. Someone ought to analyze this literature to learn what it is about Amish life that so appeals to an obviously sizeable segment of the American population.

Social scientists have also produced a considerable literature on the Amish. Senior anthropologists will doubtless recall the seminal studies that John Hostetler, himself of Amish ancestry, undertook in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, much of it published by The Johns Hopkins University Press. As valuable as this work (and that of Hostetler's sometime co-author, anthropologist Gertrude Huntington) is, Amish society has been anything but stagnant, and constant updating is needed. Fortunately, scholarly studies of the Amish have also been part of the recent outpouring. Preeminent among contemporary scholars of the Amish is sociologist Donald B. Kraybill, whose works include The Riddle of Amish Culture (1989), On the Backroad to Heaven with Carl F. Bowman (2001), and Amish Enterprise: From Plows to Profits with Steven M. Nolt (1995), all published by Johns Hopkins.

In the present volume, Hurst, an emeritus professor of sociology, and McConnell, an anthropologist, both at The College of Wooster, offer a detailed and nuanced ethnographic account of the Amish in Holmes County, Ohio, 60 miles south of Cleveland. Nearly 30,000 Amish, including children, live in Holmes Co., making up about 45 percent of the county's population. Hurst and McConnell's geographic focus is especially valuable, not only because this is the largest Amish settlement in the country (one-seventh of the Amish in the United States live in Holmes Co.), but because it corrects the Pennsylvania Amish bias in both Hostetler's and Kraybill's work. It also underscores the variability of Amish society, in which most decisions are made at the level of church district (of which there were 221 in Holmes Co. in 2009, each typically comprised of 25 to 40 families), with only limited oversight (and little real authority) at higher levels. More than this, Hurst and McConnell make a point of examining the variation within the Holmes County Amish community, focusing on the 11 different groups or "affiliations" of Amish in the area. A real strength of the book is the authors' admonition to avoid stereotyping and essentializing the Amish, something the popular literature mentioned above tends to do.

Hurst and McConnell write that their study of the Amish in Holmes Co. is based on a decade of general familiarity with the community and seven years of systematic field research. In an appendix, they describe their methodology which included the use of questionnaires, observations, and interviews with over 200 individuals—Amish, ex-Amish, and outsiders. The organization of their book resembles that of a traditional ethnography with chapters on family life, education, work, health, and religion (which gets two chapters). The first and final chapters bookend these with general observations about Amish life. The authors do not structure their account around a single theoretical perspective, although they do employ an overall conceptual model and give special attention...