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Old Order Amish men did not own gasoline tractors or other large power farm implements to amplify their manhood, and Amish women did not own mechanical household appliances to symbolize their feminine role as housekeepers. Rejecting the notion of mechanized, capital-intensive agriculture in favor of traditional, labor-intensive family farming, the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, practiced a system of labor that necessarily required the crossing of strict gender-role boundaries. Although men primarily identified as farmers and women as homemakers, agricultural success among the Amish necessitated a significant degree of cooperation and mutual labor. In the words of one Old Order Amish wife of the 1930s, “On our farm I did whatever needed to be done.” Employing data from the federal government’s Study of Consumer Purchases, the authors investigate how the traditional gender arrangements of the county’s Amish population enabled them to survive the Great Depression more successfully than other agrarian communities. [Abstract by author.]

"In this symposium review, three agricultural and environmental researchers discuss the book Nature and the Environment in Amish Life by David McConnell and Marilyn Loveless, both of the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. McConnell is an anthropology professor and co-author of Amish Paradox (2010, Johns Hopkins University Press) and has published his research in Human Organization, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, and the Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies (JAPAS) (Moledina, et al. 2014). Loveless is a biology emeritus professor; this is her first academic publication about the Amish. Our reviewers offer a variety of reactions to this book. The first reviewer, historian Steven Reschly, is a founding board member of the Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies and is currently assistant editor. He has written on Amish agricultural history in The Amish on the Iowa Prairie (2000, Johns Hopkins University Press) and in articles in Agricultural History, Mennonite Quarterly Review, JAPAS, and others. Scot Long completed his Ph.D. in anthropology at Ohio State University, having conducted extensive research on Amish farm households in southeastern Holmes County, OH. He has also published in JAPAS (Long and Moore 2014) about the impact of the environmental landscape on Amish church districts. Caroline Brock completed her Ph.D. in envirnoment and resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on theoretical models for understanding Amish responses to agriculture and the environment, including organic dairy adoption and water quality conservation practices. Her research has appeared in Environmental Management, Society & Natural Resources, Journal of Rural Studies, Sustainability, JAPAS, and other outlets. She recently worked as a senior research associate at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster, OH. This book will certainly generate many conversations and hopefully inspire further research into the Amish relationships with agriculture and the environment. [Abstract by editor]"

"Editor’s introduction—This symposium offers the reviews of two authors who, without sparing whatever criticism can be mustered, hold her work up as archetypal for rigorous methods and theory in plain Anabaptist studies. I have little more to say about Luann Good Gingrich’s work than that it is has been long, long in waiting. But let me add just a bit more and say why. Now here is a study where a researcher has brought thick theory to interpret meticulously collected and presented interview data about a plain Anabaptist group (Old Colony Mennonites) in the context of broader forces. Yet, with her findings, she rejects the classic pattern in Amish and plain Anabaptist studies to engage in topical incest; instead, she pollinates larger theory with new life. Situated in social work, Good Gingrich’s research has broad implications for the social sciences, both for strengthening Bourdieu’s theories and in bringing into focus from the Old Colony Mennonite case the inherent contradictions in the Canadian welfare and market system. Good Gingrich’s investigation of these Mennonites is fresh food for thought, instantly palatable, to the hungry scholar in Amish and plain Anabaptist studies. For one, she avoids the long-rooted dichotomy of insider/outsider and instead explores the permanent temporality of separatist Mennonites engaging the world (and vice versa), an umbrella for many other suspended contradictions in both Mennonite and state habituses and fields. The Mennonites are, ultimately, socially excluded (marginally included) by both self-imposition and the Canadian social field. Her work should be emulated in at least three ways. First, transcribed quotes are extensive. Not only are the conclusions drawn from data verifiable in the text but her respondents are given voice far beyond the small snippets—or even absence—of voice in most other monographs about plain people. Second, she feels no obligation to entertain the readers with factoids and descriptive passages about Old Colony Mennonites, but, after presenting necessary data and background, moves for a page—or even pages—into theorizing that may make little to no direct mention of Mennonites. Her focus is broadly conceptual and purposive, not a stream of Mennonite trivia. Finally, her conclusions are cautious and, ultimately, inconclusive, far from the boastful, publicity-conscious, definitive-sympathetic-authoritative-comprehensive study of an insider. The study opens more questions than answers, inviting other scholars to contribute. —Cory Anderson, editor, Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies"

Scholars of Amish history and culture, and scholars of Anabaptist and Anabaptist-descent groups more generally, have not engaged consistently or productively with mainstream theoretical developments in social and cultural studies. The phrase used most often in Amish Studies, “negotiating with modernity,” has limited usefulness because of its abstractions and time restrictions. A viable alternative rises from the research and writings of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who formulated Habitus and Field as terms to theorize about the interaction of internal and external in human experience, perhaps the oldest and thorniest issue in the social sciences. Reformulated for more general use as “structuring intuition” and “structured intuition” can help, for example, historicize Amish Studies and, by extension, research on other Anabaptist groups. An example of how this might operate is provided by the history of Anabaptist and Amish agriculture from the early modern European “agricultural revolution” to the early twenty-first century. Habitus and Field enable one to describe and explain the consistencies of Amish habits of mind concerning agriculture, or their “structuring intuition,” as those habits confront and adjust to shifting economic, political, social, and cultural environments, or field as “structured intuition.” Brief examples from eighteenth-century France, nineteenth-century Iowa, twentieth-century Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and early twenty-first century Iowa must suffice to outline what this portable adaptation of Bourdieu might produce.

"The Amish is a 500-some page university press-sized handbook that touches on a variety of topical areas. The book is the culmination of two and a half decades each of Kraybill’s, Johnson-Weiner’s, and Nolt’s work about the Amish. Karen Johnson-Weiner published a series of linguistic studies through the 1990s, and from these spring-board works later explored more fully schools and New York settlements. Donald Kraybill’s first Amish-focused publication was a Durkheimian study of the Amish and suicide in 1986. From then on he has maintained this functionalist orientation in comparative studies of plain Anabaptists and Amish responses to cultural, economic, and political change. Steven Nolt’s work follows two threads: Amish history, of which his A History of the Amish (1992) stands as the premiere testament, and Amish identity, realized most fully in Plain Diversity (2007), co-authored with Thomas Meyers. While Kraybill and Nolt have collaborated on seven publications, this is Johnson-Weiner’s first publication with either. Given the book’s volumous size and its claim to be the first generalist book about the Amish since John Hostetler’s first edition of Amish Society (1963), we as co-editors felt the book merited special review via a symposium in JAPAS. Three respondents provide reviews: a scholar of the Amish, a scholar outside Amish studies, and an Amishman. The first is Steven Reschly, a JAPAS editorial board member whose research focuses on Midwestern Amish and Amish from around the 1870s to 1930s. His work extends Bourdieau’s theories by arguning for a community-based Amish repetoire of action. The second reviewer is Benjamin Zeller, who has published several books about New Religious Movements and religion & food. He is Assistant Professor of Religion at Lake Forest College. The third reviewer is Tom Coletti, a long-term convert to the Amish and a farmer in the Union Grove, NC, community. Megan Bogden, a former student in Ohio State University’s Amish Society course, provides a brief book summary. —Cory Anderson, co-editor"

Plain groups differentiate themselves from the world, and from one another, by technology. It is worth recalling, however, that before the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Amish farmers and artisans used the same technologies as their neighbors, and were often more advanced than those around them in agricultural techniques and tools. This article examines the early development of technological differences as markers of subcultural boundaries based the massive Study of Consumer Purchases (S.C.P.) conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the U.S. Department of Labor, and the Bureau of Home Economics in the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1935 and 1936.