The Amish Sharon Connell
Ant 101 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Vasilica Margarit
2/4/13
The Amish people mainly live in Holmes County, Ohio about 60 miles south of Cleveland. Almost 30,00 Amish including children, live their that is 45 percent of the county's population. Hurst, an emerities professor of sociology and anthropologist both at College of Wooster, offer a detailed and nuanced account of the Amish in Holmes County. Ohio Hurst and McConnell their study is based on general familiarity with community and seven years of systematic field research. How they did this research was which included questionnaires, observations, and interviews of over 200 individuals, Amish, ex-Amish, and outsiders. the title suggests, they are interested in the paradoxes that surround Amish life, Amish people like to be left alone but some times they interact too. They negotiations between the community and the individual, regulation and freedom, and tradition and modernity . Many books have been published in the last 25 years. They need to always update anything on the Amish life. One of the books is a heartwarming and faith-affirming novels about finding god and love in the context of the quaint Amish community. We need to analyze this literature to learn what it is about Amish life that the American population obviously like. Amish cultural revalued around agriculture. Farm life is diversified and requires a wide range of manual skills. It is the family's foundation of Amish society to work together as a unit, fostering family self-reliance farm life is not governed by clocks it is deliberately paced. Their are only a few interrupted for the occasions without an inconvenience. Amish are struggling to adapt to conditions across the United states. Where relocating where land is available. Others are finding different occupations, including operating business or just working for someone else like in a factory. The impacts of this change on individual, families and communities. Changed meaning of "home," role complementarity between wives and husbands, leisure time and significantly increasing disparities in wealth. The Paradox
The Amish paradox is a really detailed and highly readable account of one settlement of Amish: the most visible ethnic religions minority in the united States. My criticism is that the authors restrict themselves is only brief quotes from their Amish informants, more quotations would give readers a better sense of how Amish themselves understand their lives and place in the world.
The Conservative Mennonite Church The Conservative Mennonite Church of Croghan in Lewis County New York. Where sisters Barbara Zehr and Charlene Moser were born in the 1950's (their parents raised six daughters) on a farm. These sisters married local conservative Mennonite men. They decided to stay i Croghan and take up farming. The two sisters family lived in France fled from the Alsace in search of religious freedom and economic stability in North America. Charlene and her husband operated a diary and lived on the land that she grow up on. Barbara worked at a John Deere implement dealership. I the 1970's and 1980's the church came upon a serious challenge discipline where the women of preschool children stay at home and on the farm. They also encouraged women to wear prayer covering a small mesh cap that symbolized their submission to men and their membership in Mennonite Church. Also women at this time starting "work out" off farm wage- paying work. So they could save their farms from financial ruins. These are some ot the changes that happen in these times. The women even though they worked eight hours outside the farm they still came home and did all their farm work chores, milking the cow, and getting the hay which was three quarters of a mile from home. They would take their children with them , they did not want
