The Amish, not a static subculture

The Amish are not a static subculture as is often thought, but they do change over the years. The article below describes Amish culture in general and specifically, in the sense of making choices in the adoption of technology, making trade-offs between the Amish faith and the surrounding American outside world.

Amish, background

The Amish, named after their leader Jacob Amman, are a devout Orthodox religious community who emigrated to America from Germany and Switzerland in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Amish are an offshoot of the Swiss Brethren, a group of Anabaptists that was active in Switzerland. The Anabaptists are a group of believers who in the 16th century rebelled against the Church of Rome and the Reformation, in order to create a pure church, that is to say; separate from the state. The Anabaptists preached, among other things, adult baptism instead of infant baptism as it had to be a conscious choice, hence the name Anabaptists. The split (1693) of this group of Anabaptists who now form the Amish had to do with more fundamentalist views of Jacob Amman and his followers, focused on faith. Due to wars, persecution, plundering and famine, the Amish emigrated to America in Pennsylvania around the 17th and 18th centuries. The placement in Pennsylvania is because of the freedom of religious expression that was guaranteed there; William Pen, the founder of the state of Pennsylvania, had invited religiously persecuted groups to build a new life in his state/its forests as part of a sacred experiment. The first groups arrived in 1737. Today the Amish Community has approximately 150,000 members and approximately 850 church districts. Amish live in settlements, as will be discussed later. These settlements are spread across 23 states in America and 1 province in Canada.

Amish: general description of the culture

The definition of culture: the set of customs, institutions, symbols, representations and values of a group.
The Amish are a religious subculture, created as a resistance to the programming society around them. As mentioned earlier, the Amish strove for a pure church, without the influence of the state.
The Amish culture as a specific human survival strategy adheres to certain characteristics and traditional norms and values. This includes:

The costume: This is sober and modest. The men and women wear old-fashioned black suits. Men also wear a wide hat and a beard around the chin. The women have an awning-like cap.
Moving with a horse and cart: the cart is a black closed or semi-open four-wheeled carriage, called a buggy
Rejection of technology and education: Amish educate their children themselves, do not use the electricity grid and do not have telephones in the house (only outside the village).
Language: Pennsylvania Deitsch – a mixture of the German language that can only be understood by Amish. Prayers and hymns are read in High German
Working the land: tradition that dates back to the religious persecution to which the Amish were subjected; fleeing to barren areas, belief in hard and physical work to counteract laziness, pleasures of the world. And later according to the Bible; ‘agriculture as an occupation for people of God’

The above indicates which expressions belong to the Amish culture. These expressions aim to preserve the central values in Amish culture. These values are: strict obedience to God, living according to the word of the Bible, humility, self-denial, modesty, resignation, simplicity and austerity, living with nature, stewardship, small scale, community, mutual solidarity, non-violence, cherishing the family, high work ethic and separation from the world. This is at odds with the values of Western societies, such as individualism, careerism, freedom from tradition, etc.) Separation from the world is necessary for the Amish to maintain their central cultural values.

The Amish have a patriarchal culture; deviant behavior is not tolerated and if it is exhibited, it is punished with banishment, personal development outside the usual pattern is condemned, access to higher education is blocked, professional prospects are narrowly limited, cultural participation is not an issue, there is strict social control and discipline, homosexuality is impossible, variation in lifestyles is unknown and there is a general incompetence when it comes to general knowledge about world events around them.

The Amish are constantly busy with cultural boundaries and making compromises. Examples of cultural border control:

Electrical equipment is prohibited, but equipment powered by hydraulic pressure or air pressure is accepted.
Ownership of a car and telephone is not permitted, this undermines their consciously chosen isolation from the world. A communal outside telephone and calling non-Amish neighbors is allowed. This solves problems in an emergency.
Moving by horse and cart is a continuously visible confirmation of ‘being different’. Simplicity and austerity, connection with nature and humility. Cultural border control constitutes being allowed to ride in a car of a non-Amish person. This way, the preservation of one’s own cultural identity is guaranteed.

Amish, kinship systems

Kinship is based on biological relationships between individuals. Furthermore, it is a language in which the structure of society is described. Fatherhood and motherhood are, apart from begetting and bringing children into the world, a cultural phenomenon. In addition, not all relationships are utilized or recognized, so kinship can be less than a network of genetic and cultural relationships.

The Amish society is caring, meeting the needs and wants of one’s own family members and one’s own community is one of the pillars. of this society. Kinship is directly related to God, we are all brothers and sisters of each other. The family is the basis of a collective biography of parents and their children. Amish families have an average of seven children per family. Widows and widowers remarry. The birth rate means that Amish youth and adults are often forced to look for work outside of farming.

Expressions of Amish kinship

Barn Raising: building a new barn for another Amish family in one day with the entire community. Amish rely on the group instead of the individual and also have limited access to resources, so in a practical sense they also depend on each other.
Education: Amish are taught in special Amish schools. The survival of a subculture like Amish requires a process of socialization into the basic values and norms and cultural practices that distinguish them from the broader world. Education is a determining factor here, in addition to the family. Amish education is an instrument to teach students practical skills that are part of the Amish culture. Amish students are taught values such as humility, cooperation, perseverance, mutual help and care, tradition and curtailing self-pride. Education takes place from 6 – 14 years
Border control: education within your own circle is the most important asset when it comes to cultural border control. Initiating and training new generations at an essential level.
Rumspringa: phase in which Amish adolescents try their luck on the relationship market. Opportunities to meet each other include singing evenings organized on Sundays. Young people from several church districts meet in a barn, boys on one side of the table, girls on the other to promote eye contact. If a girl allows a boy to be taken home at the end of the evening, this is often the harbinger of a permanent courtship. Marriage among 9 out of 10 Amish young people is in church and at the age of their early 20s. Marriage marks the end of the wild years, men grow beards. Patriarchal character – no intimacy or romantic fuss. Resignation characterizes marriage. Divorce rarely occurs and is a reason for banishment (excommunication)
Focused on kinship in the sense of biological relationships between individuals, inbreeding occurs among the Amish, as a result of intermarriage between the Amish themselves. Because virtually no people from outside the community join the Amish, almost every Amish is genetically related to each other. Inbreeding increases the risk of diseases. Characteristic for the Amish is the Ellis-van Creveld syndrome, in which symptoms include dwarfism and polydactyly (more than 10 fingers or toes).

Amish, social differences

The Amish have three social units above the level of the family:

The settlement: a geographically defined space in which Amish families live together. The settlement is an agricultural community, and has been placed outside the inhabited world due to its consciously chosen social isolation and ability to work the land. The houses are not connected to the electricity grid, are lit by a gas lamp, contain no personal decorations such as curtains and carpeting; the houses serve the community and not the individual. Lancaster County is the largest Amish settlement in America after Holmes County (Ohio).
The church district: district in which the service is held. This is not a permanent building but happens on a rotating basis in Amish families’ homes. This takes place once every two weeks on Sunday, the Sunday in between is used for family visits. The service lasts 3.5 hours and ends with a shared meal. The clothing is, as always, uniform; this to emphasize unity. The body language of the Amish is controlled and placement in the ‘church’ is based on gender and age. Married men and women in the front, unmarried men behind them, unmarried women behind them, children behind them. The meal after the service is consumed separately (man/woman).
The affiliation: contains church districts that are in fellowship (agreement on basic doctrines and rituals) with each other. The affiliate provides, among other things, an Amish newspaper for the various districts spread across 23 states in America and 1 province in Canada (as previously indicated) in which daily matters such as the harvest, the weather and upcoming barn raisings are discussed. In a broader sense, the affiliation is the governing body that ensures the mutual equality and like-mindedness of Amish lifestyle and rules

The Amish have a patrilineal society , based on the father/husband role. There are three unpaid church positions, reserved for men who are referred to as Servants.

The Full Servant (leader of the church district: performs ritual ceremonies, main sermon and takes disciplinary measures if necessary; comparable to a judge)
Diener zum Buch (preachers who deliver part of the sermon, the shorter opening sermon; comparable to ministers)
Poor servant (has the task of providing for the needs of needy church members and functions, especially in the past now less and less, as a mediator between an Amish girl and boy who intend to marry each other.

Amish, religion and magic

The degree of orthodoxy and permitted freedoms that the Amish preach are not the same in all settlements and districts. When they settled in America, the Amish were still largely unorganized. To cope with new circumstances that would arise in the future, the legislation of the Amish, The Ordnung, was tightened. Tensions that arose from this led to a camp that sided with the old faith and a camp that sided with a more change-oriented faith:

Conservative: Old Order Amish: this branch of the Amish, characterized by great piety, preaches seclusion from the world. In this sense, the Amish see themselves as a chosen people against the sinful world. The Old Order Amish preach the faith as it began with the split in 1693.
Reformist: Amish Mennonites: Over time, this group completely joined the Mennonite Church and gave up their original identity and culture.

Essential aspects in the Amish religion:

The Ordnung. The Ordnung is a very strict regulation that determines which behaviors are permitted and which are prohibited. Violating these rules will result in shunning or expulsion of those members who have not complied with the Ordnung. BV members driving a car while this is prohibited
Voluntary adult baptism. Takes place between ages 16 – 21
Taking the baptismal vow in accordance with the word of the Bible

When taking this baptismal vow, one promises to distance himself from the world and to follow only God and the church, lifelong loyalty to God and his church and one agrees that Jesus Christ is the son of God. After going through these two aspects, one is a full member of the church. Preparation for going through these aspects is to follow education in the 18 articles of the Dordrecht Confession of Faith.

Religious phenomena among the Amish; rite of passage

The Amish baptism is a ceremonial rite of passage. The Amish young person is taken away from the familiar atmosphere (separation), is taught the 18 articles of the Dordrecht Confession of Faith (liminality) and confirmed during baptism that they are different, separate from the Amish. compared to the rest of the world. Completing the baptismal vow as described above is a sign of being included in the community and a definitive obligation to the Ordnung (the Amish young person concludes a period in which certain degrees of freedom were still allowed). This promotes social cohesion and ensures preserving the Amish identity. According to some, an Amish church service can be characterized as extremely gloomy. It is a collective confession of Demut (meaning humility, submission). There is no setting, no musical instruments, no religious ornaments and no preaching from a pulpit. The form and content of the service has hardly changed over the past 100 years. Amish church services are held in the homes of Amish community members. This weekly changing group ritual in which unity, solidarity and the connection with the supernatural are central can be seen as an intensification ritual. Manipulating supernatural powers/forces does not happen. The Amish see this as questioning God’s word and that is a sin as it can lead people to innovative ideas and thus endanger the identity and survival of the Amish.

Development cooperation

Focusing on the origins of the Amish, the introduction already indicates that they consciously separated from the Church of Rome in the 16th century. In the 17th and 18th centuries, many of the Amish fled to Pennsylvania, or the woods of Penn (after the founder of Pennsylvania). This flight had to do with, among other things, the war and the fact that Amish did not have membership in worldly (i.e. ; outside the Amish community) enter into organizations, do not participate in political affairs and do not join the army, do not swear an oath. The Old order Amish preaches seclusion from the world. Development and cooperation take place within your own community. The Amish are isolated from the outside world but not cut off from the outside world. In the sense of Western society in relation to the Third World, development cooperation cannot be linked to the Amish. Although the Amish could be seen as third world in words such as, a disadvantaged community with limited personal and social development, this would not underline the cultural anthropological approach. It has therefore been decided not to express personal opinions in words such as (ver)judgment.

Globalization

Amish development in this area goes both ways. On the one hand, the Amish consciously isolate themselves from the outside world, out of fear of the loss of their own rituals, values and norms. On the other hand, the entanglement with American society is becoming increasingly intensive. Below is a summary of reasons for this entanglement and then a link to characteristics/factors of globalization:

The Amish school system (self-teaching, as already indicated in Chapter 2) is subject to political measures. That is to say: a compromise form must always be sought in relation to the statutory compulsory education.
Financial matters (such as purchasing land for their agricultural lifestyle) are arranged through banks
Amish products are sold on a public market of buyers; the women make quilts (colorful crocheted cloth), based on tradition and faith, an activity aimed at peace and reflection. These quilts are purchased by tourists and the surrounding society
Tourists visit the Amish living and habitat.
Amish have to deal with environmental and spatial planning legislation
The scope of social and economic relations, the influence of the Amish on the outside world: In today’s society, large groups of tourists flock to the Amish settlements. Reasons for this have to do with the desired seclusion, simplicity and tranquility of people and tourists and the way in which this is found among the Amish, but also with the urge to ‘watch monkeys’ like the ‘freak’ during the freak show at the fair of the past also attracted attention.
More intensive flows of communication, through technology and media (the psychological distance from countries decreases): the presence of this blurring among the Amish: Through legislation, BV restriction by the government of the territory on which the Amish operate through industrialization, the Amish are increasingly forced to work outside the farm – to come into contact with non-Amish. The psychological distance from the Amish society and the surrounding society therefore decreases.
Intrusion of economic and social practices at local and global levels (coca cola, Nike etc. for sale everywhere) among the Amish: Amish children are dressed according to Amish tradition but also wear sneakers (link to commercial society – shift in cultural border control seen from Amish)
Global infrastructure for a global network: accessibility, infrastructure of the Amish: Focused on long-distance travel, the Amish are dependent on public transport. Horsepower outweighs modern technology to some extent.

Findings

The Amish want to keep the outside world at a distance, but due to their different way of life and therefore high tourist value, they constantly attract the outside world. They are opposed to the reproduction of human images (film, video, photography) but owe their fame among the general public to the film Witness (which describes the Amish community). The growth and prosperity of the Amish today is due to a number of reasons:

Reproduction: no birth control and an average/desirable number of children of seven.
The separation and isolation that the Amish use between their community and the rest of society: from socialization and upbringing in traditional Amish customs, there is virtually nothing for Amish (children) other than their own community.
The Amish are willing to adapt to the changing world around them and are creative in finding compromises with the outside world
The Amish form a close-knit community with clear rules and inner logic and purpose (separation with the aim of concentration on serving God). A community member must be loyal, obedient, religiously disciplined and adapted to the group and ‘in return’ receives lifelong identity, a sense of belonging to a group, appreciation and emotional security

Note

My fascination with the Amish is shaped by a personal lack of some of the above core values such as simplicity, appreciation, inner peace, sense of community and identity. Glorification of the Amish culture is in no way the intention of this article. Only a degree of confrontation with one’s own society, by placing it next to the Amish community. After all, it is our society that the Amish are rebelling against.