This issue offers research that highlights the words and voices of plain Anabaptist people. Roslyn Burns seeks evidence among the Low German/Russian Mennonites for how historical, spatial, and religious contexts influence speech patterns, finding strong evidence especially for religious influence. Thalheimer seeks answers to why Amish parents send their children to a local public school in Northern Indiana when parochial options abound. Mong and Clifton use the narrative history method as a vehicle to allow Conservative Mennonite women to express themselves about their dress practices. Finally, Neriya Ben-Sharar compares Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women’s sense of the third person perspective when discussing dangers of audiovisual media and the internet, finding that—unlike many other populations which view the risks as higher for others than self—these women seem quite aware of technology’s danger for self. [First paragraph

Anderson, Cory

English

The University of Akron

Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies Volume 9 Issue 1 The Voices of Plain Anabaptist People Article 2 2021 What’s in JAPAS 9(1) and Who Should Read It? Reconceptualizing Amish and Plain Anabaptist Culture through the Voices of Its People Cory Anderson Follow this and additional works at: https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/amishstudies Please take a moment to share how this work helps you through this survey. Your feedback will be important as we plan further development of our repository. Recommended Citation Anderson, Cory. 2021. “What’s in JAPAS 9(1) and Who Should Read It? Reconceptualizing Amish and Plain Anabaptist Culture through the Voices of Its People.” Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies 9(1):v-viii. This Editor's Comments is brought to you for free and open access by IdeaExchange@UAkron, the institutional repository of The University of Akron in Akron, Ohio, USA. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies by an authorized administrator of IdeaExchange@UAkron. For more information, please contact mjon@uakron.edu, uapress@uakron.edu. Editor’s Introduction—What’s in JAPAS 9(1) and Who Should Read It? Reconceptualizing Amish and Plain Anabaptist Culture through the Voices of Its PeopleCory Anderson, editorRecommended citation: Anderson, Cory. 2021. “What’s in JAPAS 9(1) and Who Should Read It? Reconceptualizing Amish and Plain Anabaptist Culture through the Voices of Its People.” Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies 9(1):v-viii.Publication type: Editor’s comments (may be freely distributed). JAPAS is published by the Amish & Plain Anabaptist Studies Association (http://amishstudies.org) and the University of Akron.WhAt’S In JAPAS 9(1)?This issue offers research that highlights the words and voices of plain Anabaptist people. Roslyn Burns seeks evidence among the Low German/Russian Mennonites for how historical, spatial, and religious contexts influence speech patterns, finding strong evidence especially for religious influence. Thalheimer seeks answers to why Amish parents send their children to a local public school in Northern Indiana when paro-chial options abound. Mong and Clifton use the narrative history method as a vehicle to allow Conservative Mennonite women to express them-selves about their dress practices. Finally, Neriya Ben-Sharar compares Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women’s sense of the third person perspec-tive when discussing dangers of audiovisual media and the internet, finding that—unlike many other populations which view the risks as higher for oth-ers than self—these women seem quite aware of technology’s danger for self.Who Should REAd JAPAS 9(1)?First, those who want their work informed by what plain Anabaptist individuals are actually thinking; this is so rare to find even in the qualita-tive and humanities literature; more in a moment.Second, those interested in women’s voices should pay attention; two of our articles focus on plain Anabaptist women and the others include a mix of women and men. Third, information communications technol-ogy features not only in Neriya Ben-Shahar’s ar-ticle but also Thalheimer’s.Fourth, professionals and service providers should especially pay attention to Thalheimer’s article about Amish students in public school. Although his focus is on an educational institu-tion, applications for any public institution are numerous. For example, he addresses how links between institutions and Amish people form, per-sist, and dissolve, not just as a matter of interaction between these two parties but also—if not primar-ily—as a consequence of Amish people’s internal interactions. This study reminds me of the rather complex network research findings of Loomis and Janzen (1962), who over half a century ago found some evidence that Amish/non-Amish school in-tegration does not necessarily activate assimilato-ry doomsday for the Amish; instead, some rather counterintuitive convergence-oriented processes were identified.Fifth, if you are looking for models of qualita-tive interview methodology disclosures in plain Anabaptist studies, this issue has it, and we cer-tainly need more of it. Authors provide reflections on opportunities and limits in their role as an insider/outsider, e.g., Thalheimer as a school su-perintendent of an Amish-majority school, Mong as a former Mennonite adherent interviewing Conservative Mennonite women, and Neriya Ben-Sharer and Clifton as—respectively—current and former members of strict religious groups. Authors also provide relevant details about their analyses, including transcript coding, respondent selection, and listings of participants. If such disclosure is not enough to provide readers with confidence in author’s arguments, then the extensive quotations will: enough nuance exists in quotes for readers to make personally informed interpretations.Finally, legal experts interested in the 1972 Wisconsin v. Yoder decision—the Supreme Court ruling that, in effect, granted Amish the right to their own schools—should read Thalheimer’s ar-ticle. The Amish interviewees inadvertently bring our attention to how some Amish are reconcep-tualizing their views on the very socio-economic dynamics that undergirded the Yoder decision.vi Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies,Volume 9, Issue 1, Spring 2021 RESItuAtInG RESEARCh WIth thE VoICES of PlAIn AnAbAPtISt PEoPlENow to return to our first audience: those valuing the voices of plain Anabaptist people in informing research priorities. As an ethnic/reli-gious “studies” area, Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies parallels a range of other peoplehood preoccupations, such as African Studies, Jewish Studies, Gender Studies, and Mormon Studies. Yet, Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies stands out with a jarring peculiarity: several exceptions notwithstanding, the people studied are not the people doing the studies.Other “studies” areas tend to be supersaturated with navel gazers, academic departments that must struggle to diversify and attract the complemen-tary insights of non-members.  The near-absence of plain Anabaptist people in academic institu-tions is one of the most remarkable challenges our “studies” area faces. Because nearly all plain Anabaptists shy away from higher education, let alone graduate work and the professorship as a ca-reer, plain Anabaptist people are basically absent from the role of researcher. As an adherent myself, I am keenly acquainted with this gap. Why are non-adherents interested in the plain Anabaptists anyways? And more so the Amish than any other group? What explains the almost absolute dearth of, say, research about another Anabaptist group, the Apostolic Christians, or any number of Conservative Mennonite denomina-tions? For one, the sheer number of Amish adher-ents accounts for disproportionate attention, as our journal title acknowledges. However, the public popularity of the Amish has also attracted research-ers, perhaps due to sheer curiosity, perhaps due to perceived relevance to broader research, perhaps because Amish are large and are more likely to be noticed, or perhaps because the curious pub-lic confers prestige and money on interpreters—“Amish” has currency and public recognition in ways that Apostolic Christian, German Baptist, and Conservative Mennonite do not.Yet, without the involvement—let alone di-rectly quoted voice—of plain Anabaptist people, we lack accountability and risk appropriation, exploitation, stereotyping, and othering-oriented reification of the very people we research, as I and other scholars have stated in one form or another (Anderson et al. 2019; Billig and Zook 2017; Enninger 1987; Garneau et al. 2018; Good Gingrich 2016; Louden 1991; Olshan 1981; Petrovich 2017). An indirect statement of these concerns is represented in an earlier co-authored publication by our JAPAS copy editor, Rosanna Hess. Hers is the only Amish-focused publication I know of where first authorship is conferred on a group of Amish participants! See Amish Burn Study Group, et al. (2014).So how do we study people who are unrepre-sented, whose voices are absent in our study area? This issue of JAPAS responds with four articles that privilege the words and voices of plain Anabaptists in research—Burns in actual pronunciation, the others in words—thickly icing their final product with rich, extensive quotes that allow the ethnic-religious population under study to speak their mind and readers to freely interpret meanings. I can think only of Luann Good Gingrich’s Out of Place: Social Exclusion and Mennonite Migrants in Canada (2016) —much admired by many of our JAPAS staff—as a precedent for this depth of voice-probing. Far too much writing—whether scholarship or popular—approaches the Amish or Mennonites at the group level, offering some sort of seemingly obligatory statement about their history, religious beliefs, demographic dynamics, church structure, and peculiarity: “the Amish believe,” “the Amish frown upon,” “Compared to the outside world, the Amish” and so forth. More recently, it has become fashionable to qualify such overarching state-ments by noting the existence of “diversity,” but this only excuses, rather than reforms, poor initial conceptualizations. The consequence of this other-oriented approach is an overly structured view of Amish individuals’ lives and a neglect of the mul-tiple structures within which individuals develop identity, identify others, and perform social action.In contrast, research in this issue of JAPAS makes only minimal assumptions about what de-fines “Amish” or “Mennonite”—for the sake of a sampling frame—working instead from the bot-tom up, from individual agents to the tenuous so-cial structures and ideologies they create. In prior research, we have been told repeatedly that church leaders and authorities, Ordnung, and subcultural group consciousness are noteworthy characteris-tics of the Amish and Mennonites. In these studies, however, a surprising lack of explicit references to these structures’ deterministic influence exists. vii Instead, we see vignettes of individuals creating and recreating values and social realities in ways and places we have been ill-prepared to encoun-ter, and it shapes particular social actions: speech, dress, internet (non)access, and school selection.This issue’s authors permit interviewees to shift attention to agential emic considerations in a way often running against the familiar etic-ori-ented latent functionalist narratives in scholarship. For Burns, agency shows up in the way words are pronounced, as individuals orally differenti-ate themselves from other Low German speak-ers according to their particular socio-religious experiences and history. For Thalheimer, agency expresses itself in school selection and opinions about other people, be they Amish or non-Amish. For Mong, agency is expressed in dress decision-making and ambivalence; far from having overly structured lives, individuals express a desire for more structure and teaching from church leaders. For Neriya Ben-Shahar, individuals rationalize their reservations against internet excesses; they are concerned about self, alongside family, with moderate reference to church-community. Unlike the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish comparison, the Amish women rarely reference their leaders and church, instead personally owning their responses. When in research, we allow plain people to define the cultural domains and structures of inter-est, when we give considerable room for the peo-ple under study to define what is of interest and what gets researched, we get a loosely collected picture that may even appear offensive and self-justifying. This is not a utopic Smurf Village, as Billig and Zook memorably stated in JAPAS 5(1). Far from a coherent, self-evident, functionally re-enforcing structure, plain Anabaptist people manage changing identities that are situationally invoked according to the logics of multiple, nested structures, which themselves are not necessarily “Amish” or “Mennonite.” This insight follows Wimmer’s (2013) convincing conceptualization of all ethnic groups.Consequently, we see an Amish and Mennonite culture where meanings of actions and symbols are probed, unstable, and contested—be it in language (Burns), schooling (Thalheimer), or clothing (Mong and Clifton)—rather than fixed. We have here a cross-sectional snapshot of where some plain Anabaptists are today. These individuals’ opinions are not mechanically referencing some collective superscript; rather, individuals selectively tap into logic structures that can be incoherent and incon-sistent in order to make sense of social action. This is the revolution in cultural research that both Swidler (1986) and Sewell (1999) have brought about and Amish and plain Anabaptist studies has been slow to engage. Our research area has not been through a theory revolution in rethinking agency, structure, and culture. Those who would understand the plain Anabaptist people must de-vote attention to the emic perspective. This issue’s articles show individual’s priorities: interpersonal disagreements; ambivalence about certain rules; attitudes that seem indiscriminate toward a reified “world” but are actually quite nuanced; dysfunc-tional neighborhoods and parochial schools; mod-esty in dress; socialization of children; not being like “those other” types of Anabaptist people; and many other matters.Thankfully, broader social scientific research addressing culture, structure, and social action offer compelling new theories and frameworks which readily map on to the Amish and Mennonite experience, if we will take the time to understand and properly apply them, as well as invest in im-mersing ourselves in the nuanced world of plain Anabaptist people. For one, I am particularly drawn to Patterson’s (2014) sprawling synthesis of cultural domains and processes, which suggests three categories of symbolic meaning-making are nested and are activated in the form of practical knowledge when engaging different types of con-texts. As with Enninger’s (e.g., 1979) nuanced and rich research on Amish macro-micro structures, values, symbols, and social change (synthesized in Anderson 2017), this model of culture is partic-ularly challenging to engage because of its sheer magnitude; yet, we need theories of magnitude to advance our work. At a more modest level of conceptual advance, Vaisey (2008; 2009) offers a compelling argument that cultural values operate at multiple levels; one level, captured in Swidler’s concept of culture, is at the surface and can be articulated in interviews. A deeper level of culture is difficult to articulate but can be probed using well-constructed, close-ended questionnaires, which suggest value sys-tems rather than asking interviewees to identify them open-endedly. Certainly, Jolly’s (2017) ex-ploration of how deep culture becomes embodied in Amish birthing strength illustrates this deep viii Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies,Volume 9, Issue 1, Spring 2021 cultural process, even as it’s not the first place I would personally ponder evidence of deep culture. My thoughts instead go to conversations with other plain Anabaptist people about hot-button issues during times of social change. I can just stew to no end over these barrages of culturally appealing rationales, whether for or against a given change or issue. Akin to these conversations, the quotes in this issue’s articles also suggest some deep cul-tural processes, and they likewise leave me with this nagging sense that some amorphous, deeper values are never fully articulated. Perhaps we need more dual-process methodologies—combin-ing both interviews and surveys, as Neriya Ben-Shahar starts to do in her brief survey instrument.As we have come to expect with JAPAS, this issue continues our strides toward an understand-ing of the plain Anabaptists that is deep, fresh, and needed. It continues to offer research that brings together rigorous methods and conceptual frame-works, and draws attention to the intriguing work of several new and up-and-coming scholars.REfEREnCESAmish Burn Study Group, Nicole Kolacz, Mark Jaroch, Monica Bear, and Rosanna Hess. 2014. “The Effect of Burns & Wounds (B&W) / Burdock Leaf Therapy on Burn-Injured Amish Patients.” Journal of Holistic Nursing 32(4):327-40.Anderson, Cory. 2017. “The Undistinguished Scholar of the Amish, Werner Enninger, -or- Has the Time Yet Come for Rigorous Theory in Amish Studies?” Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies 5(2):196-238.Anderson, Cory, Joseph Donnermeyer, Jeffrey Longhofer, and Steven D. Reschly. 2019. “A Critical Appraisal of Amish Studies’ De Facto Paradigm, ‘Negotiating with Modernity’.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 58(3):725-42.Billig, Michael, and Elam Zook. 2017. “The Functionalist Problem in Kraybill’s Riddle of Amish Culture.” Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies 5(1):82-95.Enninger, Werner. 1979. “Structural and Prag-matic Properties of Grooming and Garment Grammars.” Pp. 467-75 in Semiotic Unfolding, edited by T. Borbe. Haag, Netherlands: Mouton.—. 1987. “Amish English: Dutchified?” Pp. 547-79 in Perspectives on Language in Performance, edited by W. Lörscher and R. Schulze. Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr.Garneau, Amélie Blanchet, Helen Farrar, HaiYan Fan, and Judith Kulig. 2018. “Applying Cultural Safety beyond Indigenous Contexts: Insights from Health Research with Amish and Low German Mennonites.” Nursing Inquiry 25(1):e12204.Good Gingrich, Luann. 2016. Out of Place: Social Exclusion and Mennonite Migrants in Canada. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.Jolly, Natalie. 2017. “Birthing New Kinships: The Cross-Pollinating Potential of Amish Health Research.” Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies 5(2):147-61.Loomis, Charles, and Carl Jantzen. 1962. “Boundary Maintenance vs. Systemic Linkage in School Integration: The Case of the Amish in the United States.” Journal of the Pakistan Academy for Village Development 3(2):1-25.Louden, Mark. 1991. “The Image of the Old Order Amish: General and Sociolinguistic Stereotypes.” National Journal of Sociology 5(2):111-42.Olshan, Marc. 1981. “Modernity, the Folk Society, and the Old Order Amish: An Alternative Interpretation.” Rural Sociology 46(2):297-309.Patterson, Orlando. 2014. “Making Sense of Culture.” Annual Review of Sociology 40(1):1-30.Petrovich, Christopher. 2017. “More than Forty Amish Affiliations? Charting the Fault Lines.” Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies 5(1):120-42.Sewell, William. 1999. “The Concept(s) of Cul-ture.” Pp. 35-61 in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, edited by V. Bonnell, L. Hunt, and R. Biernacki. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51(April):273-86.Vaisey, Stephen. 2008. “Socrates, Skinner, and Aristotle: Three Ways of Thinking about Culture in Action.” Sociological Forum 23(3):606-22.—. 2009. “Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action.” American Journal of Sociology 114(6):1675-715.Wimmer, Andreas. 2013. Ethnic Boundary Making: Institutions, Power, Networks. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

What’s in \u3cem\u3eJAPAS\u3c/em\u3e 9(1) and Who Should Read It? Reconceptualizing Amish and Plain Anabaptist Culture through the Voices of Its People

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What’s in \u3cem\u3eJAPAS\u3c/em\u3e 9(1) and Who Should Read It? Reconceptualizing Amish and Plain Anabaptist Culture through the Voices of Its People

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