Andres Dongo

Prof. Wynn
ANTH310
September 19, 2014
Amish Assignment Questions
1) The Amish culture is shared through the work, since children they are helping
with the agriculture work and they grow doing it.
2) Amish children learn culture through their work, the school and church.
3) The Amish take their culture for granted ignoring the technology progress and
sticking to their basic needs. Even though phones have been implemented. The
use of it is outside of their premises.
4) The Amish are more likely to marry within their community and may marry
within their family. This is known to cause genetic disorders affecting biological
processes producing genetic diseases.
5) The Amish have been open to medical services, and have being selling their
products on Markets, paying taxes and following laws. The buggys have been
adapted to fit into modern roads with lights. Amish education has been recognized
and accepted. They have started to work outside of their community in factories
and construction near by their community.
6) Age-grading, calendar, community organization, cooking, cooperaive labor,
courtship, divination, division of labor, education, ethics, ethno-botany, etiquette,
fire-making, taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift-giving, greetings,
hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kinship
nomenclature, language, mealtimes, medicine, personal names, postnatal care,
property rights, puberty customs, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual
restrictions, soul concepts, trade.
7) Amish culture is adaptive in the thought put into producing healthy foods and
healthy animals, that in the long run will make them healthier than people who are
not eating like them.
8) Amish culture is integrated because the Ordnung is the set of rules and values that
every Amish has to follow; and a change to it will affect every Amish.
9) The idea of community is always pleasing to me but their way of life has been
changing a lot in the past 20 years that I dont see an strong and closed
community as the one showed in the 2000s documentary The Amish: People of
Preservation. The Amish population is growing fast; new communities have been
arising because their original ones are not big enough to hold all the families. The
Amish from different parts of the USA and Canada can speak a variety of

languages, like English, Pennsylvania Dutch or German, or Amish-Swiss. Not all

the men are dedicated to agriculture and they are forced to work outside of their
communities to meet their family needs. Teenagers are exposed outside of their
community. I can understand what the Ordnung says and why they chose to live
with those sets of rules, and refuse to electricity and technology but there was a
thought that I had in all of the documentaries that I watched, and is that the Amish
dont have many ways of self-expression.