Horse-and-Buggy Genius: Listening to Mennonites Contest the Modern World by Royden Loewen (review)

Two Mennonite groups, sharing a common Anabaptist Christian heritage, but reflecting different geographic and linguistic histories, compose the cultural phenomenon of the book’s title. “Horse-and-buggy” is shorthand for an anti-modern, technology-at-arms-length approach to living in a century associated more with individual freedoms and urbanization than with communitarianism. In southern Ontario, approximately 12,000 “Old Order” Mennonites live in agrarian communities near densely populated urban areas. Meanwhile, in Mexico, Belize, Bolivia, and Paraguay, more than 100,000 “Old Colony” Mennonites, descendants of conservative western Canadian Mennonites who left for Mexico in the 1920s and then migrated further south, inhabit Latin American colonies known for farming and small manufacturing economies, close kinship ties, and religious ideals. Historian Royden Loewen, an “acculturated” Mennonite with a long-held interest in the resiliency of Old Order and Old Colony peoples, offers a readable oral history of these religious subcultures, framed by questions concerned with adaptation, mobility, conflict, and cultural contestation.

This work emphasizes commonalities among “horse-and-buggy” people and, as an oral history, gives special attention to their own words reflecting on community life. The book title’s nod to virtuosity showcases Loewen’s main argument. What, he asks, “is the genius of this survival?” (104). How do such places as Linwood Old Order Mennonite Church, north of Kitchener/Waterloo, and Riva Palacios Colony with its three dozen Mennonite villages south of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, sustain themselves in the face of modernity? His response is frankly admiring of culturally conservative Mennonites whose narratives of family life and migration “emphasize the community over the individual, the local over the nation, simplicity over profit, and peace over violence” (4). Their selective adaptations of technologies over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reflect their intentions to accept innovations that benefit the community as a whole rather than elevating individual well-being. A clear illustration comes from a Bolivian Mennonite who acknowledges that the “steel wheel will not take me to heaven” yet adds: “If we allow rubber tires, the next thing I will want an air-conditioned cab, then a car, and then city life” (95). Horse-and- buggy Mennonites’ concerns about slippery slopes that threaten to conflate two worlds–that of their church community and wider society–permeate the work.

The field study underpinnings of Horse-and-Buggy Genius reflect an ambitious effort to bring insights to a broader public about what the author terms an “untold story” of conservative Mennonites whose practices differ–at least nominally–from better-known Amish sects in the United States. During a four-year period, Loewen and his team of student researchers conducted interviews with 250 Mennonites in thirty-five communities in Ontario and Latin America. The book’s maps illuminate this geographical dispersion and hint at the linguistic richness of these interviews, conducted in High German, Low German, Spanish, and English. Yet one of the book’s limitations is that the collaborative nature of the oral history research is veiled by Loewen’s authorial, first person voice. Thus, potentially significant questions about “insider/outsider” status are often glossed over: the dynamics of young scholars interviewing elders in patriarchal subcultures, of women interviewing men and vice versa, and of non-Mennonites interviewing Mennonites.

Interpretively, this work is at its best in passages that prompt readers to reconsider often-unquestioned tropes about historical experience and, indeed, about contemporary life. The subjects of this work “implicitly critique modernity in stories about their way of life”; “their testimonials reveal complex and dynamic communities, all shaped by contesting the immense assimilative power of the globalized modern world” (4–5). The author’s most provocative arguments address “doing history” with subjects who resist the notion that change over time is worth celebrating. At the same time, the book demonstrates that Old Order and Old Colony Mennonites, while generally welcoming to strangers and amenable to telling stories, have their...