Writing the Amish

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Part I

Perspectives on John A. Hostetler

The four essays in Part I provide retrospective analyses of John A. Hostetler’s work as a scholar of Amish life. The first essay is autobiographical, written by Hostetler at the close of his scholarly career. The other three essays were written by active scholars specifically for this volume. Together they provide contextual assessments of Hostetler’s work, as well as interpretive frameworks for reading Hostetler’s writings in Part II of this volume.

Hostetler’s essay, “An Amish Beginning,” is a revision of a piece by the same title that appeared in American Scholar in 1992. After the original essay appeared, Hostetler began to assemble other materials for a book-length retrospective on his life. Most of those materials were additional autobiographical vignettes, the majority of which pertained to the first seventeen years of his life as an Amish boy, first in Pennsylvania and then in Iowa. Later, with the assistance of Susan Fisher Miller, these vignettes were adapted and incorporated into Hostetler’s original American Scholar essay, producing a considerably longer and more personal account of his “Amish beginning.” About two-thirds of the essay is now devoted to Hostetler’s first seventeen years, with most of the essay’s remainder devoted to his college education, his experiences as a World War II conscientious objector, and his graduate work at Pennsylvania State College and University. Readers looking for autobiographical reflections on Hostetler’s mature scholarship, his role as a mediator between the Amish and the larger public, and his work as an advocate for Amish people and causes, will find few of those reflections here. At the same time, they will be introduced to various elements of Hostetler’s early years that, according to him, shaped his commitments, his vocational choices, and his scholarship.

At its most basic level, “An Amish Beginning” constitutes Hostetler’s answer to a question he was frequently asked: How did the Amish-born Hostetler become a university professor? But the essay served another purpose, providing Hostetler with the opportunity to do once again what he did throughout his career: educate his readers about Amish life. In this latter respect, two revisions to Hostetler’s original “An Amish Beginning” essay are worth noting. First, the section describing his father’s excommunication from the Peachey Amish Church is now considerably longer. Whereas the original essay offered only one paragraph of explanation, this revised version goes into some detail about four “happenings” that eventually led to disciplinary action against his father, Joseph Hostetler. Second, the revised essay includes a new section on Amish courtship practices in which Hostetler recounts his own experience with “bundling,” a traditional courtship practice in which unmarried partners enjoy one another’s company in bed. Interestingly, these two additional sections address the two features of Amish life that, during Hostetler’s career, aroused the greatest degree of curiosity and, in some cases, disapprobation. It appears that, even at the end of his life, Hostetler was seeking to shape popular perceptions of these peculiar and often misunderstood aspects of Amish life.

The second essay in this section comes from Donald B. Kraybill, one of Hostetler’s graduate students and himself a leading scholar of Amish life. Kraybill’s personal retrospective offers insight into Hostetler’s humble and quiet personality, which Kraybill connects to Hostetler’s Amish upbringing and, just as significantly, to his effectiveness as a researcher in Amish communities. In addition to explaining the significance of Hostetler’s scholarship, Kraybill outlines the sweeping transformations underway in both mainstream American society and Amish society during the decades Hostetler worked and wrote. Much of Hostetler’s scholarship, Kraybill avers, is simply good ethnographic research, which Hostetler effectively tailored to various audiences. Still, says Kraybill, even though most of Hostetler’s analytical categories were derivative, he nonetheless offered insights into Amish culture that were profoundly original and, moreover, unavailable to persons whose fieldwork methods were less sensitive to the nuances of Amish life.

In the third essay of Part I, Simon J. Bronner examines Hostetler’s scholarship through the lenses of Hostetler’s academic disciplines. Although Hostetler earned a Ph.D. in rural sociology, he would later range into the fields of folklife studies and, increasingly, anthropology, where he felt freer to produce values-conscious scholarship. Bronner pays particular attention to Hostetler’s use of “folk society” as a way to articulate the distinctiveness of Amish life vis-à-vis mainstream American culture. As Bronner notes, Hostetler’s presentation of Amish life is as much about middle-class America as it is about the Amish, and his writing about the Amish afforded him opportunities to critique certain aspects of mainstream American life. Bronner contextualizes Hostetler’s work in three interconnected ways—by tracking contemporaneous currents in Hostetler’s academic disciplines; by noting the emergence of a new, professional class in mid-twentieth-century America; and by limning the connections between Hostetler’s sociological analyses and his worldview—and concludes his consideration of Hostetler’s work by citing his legacy for the study of Anabaptist and communitarian groups. This legacy, Bronner suggests, was one of opening up the field of Anabaptist studies to interdisciplinary inquiry, a process that invited close examination of—and challenges to—his work as the field matured.

The final essay of Part I, by David L. Weaver-Zercher, focuses on Hostetler’s religious background and the ongoing challenges he faced as a scholar, mediator, and advocate of Amish life. Weaver-Zercher recounts Hostetler’s Amish boyhood, his decision to forgo baptism in the Amish church, his mid-century Mennonite Church context, his graduate education, and various aspects of his career as a man “betwixt and between” Amish culture and mainstream American life. Drawing on Hostetler’s use of calling to explain his life trajectory, Weaver-Zercher argues that some aspects of Hostetler’s work were disconcerting to him, an unease that was unavoidable given the complexity of his task, the multiplicity of his constituencies, and his own Amish sensibilities. At the same time, Hostetler’s vocational, even spiritual, understanding of his Amish-related work provided him with important resources and personal meaning as he pursued his various tasks.

There are other lenses through which to examine Hostetler’s Amish-related work. Even so, these four essays give careful attention to the most important elements of Hostetler’s endeavor to write the Amish: his historical context, including his personal history; his chosen vocation as a scholar-mediator; his use of “folk” and “community” to explain Amish life; and his unparalleled advancement of the field of Amish studies. In that sense, these four essays provide vital perspectives for assessing Hostetler’s work and its continuing significance for the study of Amish life.

Only four abbreviations appear in the footnotes and endnotes to the essays in Part I: “Hostetler Papers” is used to indicate the John A. Hostetler Papers in the Penn State University Archives, State College, Pennsylvania; “KJV” is used to indicate the King James Version of the Bible; “JAH” is used to indicate John A. Hostetler in Hostetler’s correspondence; and “Yoder Papers” is used to indicate the Joseph W. Yoder Papers in the L. A. Beeghly Library at Juniata College, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.

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