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Essays on the amish culture
Essays on the amish culture
Essays on the amish culture
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In the mid the seventeenth century, the Amish movement was founded in Europe at the time of the Protestant Reformation. They are derived from a group impatient with the pace of reform in the existing churches. One of the main issues is baptism. A group of Anabaptists practise adult baptism. Religion is the basis of Amish life. They believe they must obey God at all times.
To the Amish family, life is highly valued. Like other aspects of Amish life, it conforms to traditional attitudes and values. Courtship to the Amish is usually secretive, and the couples' intention to wed must only be publicly announced 2 weeks before the wedding. Amish weddings usually occur on a Tuesday or Thursday to fit in time with the farming season, and the ceremony in the brides' home must only last four hours. Children also have a major involvement in family life. School ends at year 8. After year 8, children have to work around the home, farm or family business. The Amish people have no major concept of leaving home for further education or other employment opportunities. Amish people traditionally get...
Developed from the Radical Reformation in the 1300’s, a group was formed called the Anabaptists. These Anabaptists were a joint group between the Mennonites, the Hutterites, and the Amish. The Amish people came from a split in the Swiss Mennonites in 1693 when a man named Jacob Amman and his supporters left their church to begin their own. Jacob Amman was born in Switzerland as an Anabaptist in 1644, and is considered the founder of the Amish religion.
The family provides a dense web of social support from cradle to grave. […] Family members help each other during an emergency, a fire or flood, and, of course, at a death”. The Amish community would not have withstood the drastically shifting eras had it not been for their foundation built on solid family and community relationships. Within Amish homes, bonds between siblings, parents and their children, as well as potentially extended families ties including aging grandparents or other relatives, are of utmost importance. Importantly, these interrelationships are not left within the household as the Amish community holds an interconnectedness inclusive to the community that creates an additional support network. This patchwork community of benevolence is not a gift, but a reward. There are expectations and consequences, as the BBC reports “[…] Members are expected to believe the same things and follow the same code of behaviour (called the Ordnung). The purpose of the ordnung is to help the community lead a godly life. […] If a person breaks the rules they may be 'shunned', which means that no-one (including their family) will eat with them or talk to them”. Expectations must be met for an Amish individual to earn and maintain their spot within the community. Despite guidelines wavering depending on each community and their location, the Amish are expected to follow God and seek salvation in a preset and dictated manner. Punishments for breaking the ordnung are strictly enforced and the insubordinate individual is completely excommunicated as a result of their disobedience. Since family connectedness is universally valued amongst Amish communities, if an individual is shunned, they will lose not only their community status but communications will be severed between immediate family members. When applied to education, if prohibited by that particular Ordnung, pursing a higher
On March 23, 1998, I carried out an interview and field observation to confirm a previous hypothesis on Amish social change and survival. I hypothesized, based on library research and personal experience, that Amish society was not static but dynamic and affected by many factors such as economics and cultural survival. In order to check the validity of my hypothesis I arranged to spend a full Sunday (March 23, 1998), with an Amish family. I attended church services at the Westhaven Amish-Mennonite Church in New Holland, Pennsylvania, and afterward spent the day observing and interviewing with an Amish dairy farmer named Aaron and his wife Anna. They have six children and live on a dairy farm in Lancaster County Pennsylvania, which is a large farming community. I met Aaron and his family roughly four years ago while in Lancaster County with my family and since then our families have remained in close contact. Thus, to do an ethnography on the Amish, my primary informant was Aaron, someone I was already comfortable speaking with.
Wise, Stephan. "How the Amish Work." How Stuff Works.com. Amish America, 19 Sept. 2002. Web. 23 Mar. 2014.
They chose to come live in America and choose their own way of living. They were very strict people, who did not like to act differently from others. They were also very simple people who devoted most of their lives to God. Men hunted for food and were ministers. Women work at home doing chores like sewing, cooking, cleaning, and making clothes.
In the Amish world, children are brought up following all Amish family traditions and church traditions. At age 16, Amish teenagers do away with these traditions for several months to several years and go out into the “English”, modern world to experience what life is like outside of the Amish community in a tradition called Rumspringa. The hopes of Rumspringa are that Amish teenagers will see the evil in the modern world and turn back to the Amish church and community and will choose to be baptized into the faith. At this time, the parents of these Amish teenagers choose to overlook the new habits and actions of their children. The Amish parents want the best for their children and feel as though allowing them to party and live wild for a time away from them is the best way to teach their children. The parents have the approach to be hands off and ignore the behavior during Rumspringa. This is not an effective manner of parenting for these teenagers at such an influential time in their lives.
Watching the Amish riding their horse drawn carriages through Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, you catch a glimpse of how life would have been 150 years ago. The Amish, without their electricity, cars, and television appear to be a static culture, never changing. This, however, is just an illusion. In fact, the Amish are a dynamic culture which is, through market forces and other means, continually interacting with the enormously tempting culture of America. So, one might be led to wonder how a culture like the Amish, one that seems so anachronistic, has not only survived but has grown and flourished while surrounded by a culture that would seem to be so detrimental to its basic ideals. The Amish, through biological reproduction, resistance to outside culture, compromise, and a strong ethnic symbolism have managed to stave off a culture that waits to engulf them. Why study the Amish? One answer would be, of course, to learn about their seemingly pure cooperative society and value system (called Ordung). From this, one may hope to learn how to better America's problem of individualism and lack of moral or ethical beliefs. However, there is another reason to study the Amish. Because the Amish have remained such a large and distinct culture from our own, they provide an opportunity to study the effects of cultural transmission, resistance, and change, as well as the results of strong symbolism in maintaining ethnic and cultural isolation.
...n, A. M. ( 1995, Spring) The Amish Struggle with Modernity. Virginia Quarterly Review. Vol. 71, Issue 2
Towards the development of the United States of America there has always been a question of the placement of the Native Americans in society. Throughout time, the Natives have been treated differently like an individual nation granted free by the U.S. as equal U.S. citizens, yet not treated as equal. In 1783 when the U.S. gained their independence from Great Britain not only did they gain land from the Appalachian Mountains but conflict over the Indian policy and what their choice was to do with them and their land was in effect. All the way from the first presidents of the U.S. to later in the late 19th century the treatment of the Natives has always been changing. The Native Americans have always been treated like different beings, or savages, and have always been tricked to signing false treaties accompanying the loss of their homes and even death happened amongst tribes. In the period of the late 19th century, The U.S. government was becoming more and more unbeatable making the Natives move by force and sign false treaties. This did not account for the seizing of land the government imposed at any given time (Boxer 2009).
When people talk about the Illuminati, they are talking about the most secretive, powerful, wealthiest, influential, sneakiest, manipulated, greediest people on the earth. It was a group formed in Germany 1776 in order to rule the world with their wealth and power (“Illuminati” 1). Recently it has been on everyone’s mind, but why? It is being exposed more and more every day. They are trying to take over our nation. “The infamous Illuminati secret society has remained the focus of so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ for hundreds of years. They have been called the puppet masters who secretly pull the strings of the world’s events from elections to revolutions, and from business monopolies to stock market crashes” (Dice 1). People are completely oblivious of the Illuminati or chose to not believe this is going on behind closed doors. However, there are some people who do believe and are aware of what they are capable of. The Illuminati is harmfully corrupting our nation through the government, specialty groups, and celebrities.
Cries ring out in the dead of night from the black people of the southern states in Tennessee, as mysterious figures in white robes with hoods ride on their horses. To most they were thought of as the Confederate soldier’s ghosts riding and terrorizing the blacks. People wanted to know who these mysterious riders are and why they are terrorizing the black people of the south. Since they were wearing all white robes they could not tell their identity leading to more confusion. They became known as the Invisible Empire due to the fact that there were hundreds of them but nobody knew who they really were. Later in the Invisible Empires history we find out that these mysterious ghost riders are a part of the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux Klan was an organization meant to preserve the southern way of life. They use forms of intimidation to scare the black people such as riding through the night on horses. It was first started as something for ex-confederate soldiers to do since they were not fighting the war anymore but soon these small threats and intimidation turned into a violent hate group. Through the Ku Klux Klan’s history we see its practices and beliefs evolve from a fun, social organization to a worldwide feared hate group.
The Amish are a traditional community of a protestant and Anabaptist background. They are derived from a group who fled during the Protestant Reformation in
The Quakers The Quakers (Society of Friends) was formed in the 17th Century. It was thought that a man called George Fox helped form the group and gave its name Quakers. The name Quakers started as an insult to Fox when the judge said to him, “You quake at the presence of God.” He was standing in court after being one of the leaders who started Quakers, which was against the law to worship in any other way than the Roman Catholic way. The Friends Meeting House we visited in Liverpool is not classed as a church but purely as a place of worship.
The Mafia is a secret criminal organization that has great economic and political control over large parts of Sicilian society and operates both criminal and legitimate enterprises in the United States. It is believed to have started during Sicily's late Middle Ages, beginning as separate bonds of strong-arm enforcers hired by local landowners. It eventually evolved into a network of independent groups governing in rural areas. With the Sicilian immigration of the late 19th century, the Mafia began to operate in several large United States cities. During the period of Prohibition it monopolized the trade in bootleg liquor and controlled loan sharking, gambling, and prostitution. Competing Mafia families established mutually recognized territories, reaching agreement by negotiation or by intimidation. By the mid-1930 the Mafia had taken on the institutionalized structure that is now typical of organized crime in the United States.
Despite people celebrating marriage in different ways it all comes back to one thing; marriage is a social ritual that by which two people affirms one abiding contracts between. The ceremonies are composed of rituals which symbolize facets of married life and the obligations being undertaken. In Hinduism the marriage celebration can start weeks before the actual ceremony depending on the preferences of the family. Once the day of the ceremony comes around the day starts with the brides’ family welcoming the groom into their home and both families are formally introduced. Both the bride and groom sit at the Mandap- tent where the ceremony is held under,-and are offered a drink. Gifts between the two families are generally exchanged at this point. The groom's mother gives an auspicious necklace to the bride, which is essentially an emblem of the married status in the Hindu religion. Then scared fire is lit and a pundit recites t...