Even the most controversial of Amish documentaries, Devil’s Playground, which features deviant Amish teens engaged in reckless drug and alcohol use—ostensibly demonstrating that Amish life is not nearly as innocent as many imagine—succeeds by juxtaposing mainstream society with pastoral Amish lifestyles. The young people in Devil’s Playground act like stereotypical modern teenagers, living wild lives and disappointing their parents. These actions seem outrageous and worthy of a documentary only because they run counter to depictions of Amish behavior that viewers expect to see. “Which path will they choose?” asks the DVD jacket, suggesting that the young people at the center of the film must choose between a wild English life and a somber one that virtual tourists expect of Amish youth.
Hollywood too has catered to tourist expectations in portrayals of Amish life. For example, although barn raisings are no longer common in Amish settlements with waning numbers of farmers, no film about the Amish is complete without an elaborate barn raising scene. Indeed, this ritual is prominent in Peter Weir’s 1985 Hollywood film Witness, which contrasts gritty city life with the serenity of the Amish world. Weir juxtaposes images of pastoral Amish society with its fields of waving grain and spotless, quiet farmhouse interiors with nighttime scenes of inner city bars and violent criminal confrontations. There is murder and mayhem in the modern world, but as the barn raising demonstrates, there is cooperation—even between rivals—in the Amish one, where all work together for one another. Similarly, in the 1997 film For Richer or Poorer, a real estate developer and his estranged wife, on the lam from the Internal Revenue Service, find redemption in Amish farm life. The images of Amish life—milking cows, chopping wood, and cooking, all on a neat, flowered farmstead nestled in a fertile valley—prove an antidote to the rampant, fast-paced consumerism of a hypermodern world for viewer and film protagonist alike.38
If geographic tourism provided a twentieth-century portal into Amish life in particular communities, television offers a more expansive one in this century. The televised visits, despite claims of being documentaries, are also staged representations that show a producer’s artistic selections of certain slices of Amish life that rarely portray its complexity and nuance. These “documentaries” of television tourism, reality series, and talk shows—with the exception of the Amish narrators in The Amish—all show unbaptized youth in Rumspringa, ex-Amish people, actors, or in a few cases, members of other plain-dressing Anabaptist groups. With rare exceptions, bona fide adult-baptized, horse-and-buggy-driving Amish people have firmly resisted the enticements of dozens of film producers who hoped to capture their faces on camera. One production company even embedded five teams of people for several weeks in different Amish settlements, scouring communities for willing subjects.
The string of twenty-first-century televised excursions into Amish Country includes Devil’s Playground (2002) and UPN’s six-episode reality series Amish in the City, which traced the reactions of five Amish teens who lived with English teens in California in the summer of 2004 (see chapter 12). In 2008 ABC’s “Primetime: The Outsiders” tracked a group of Ohio teens in Rumspringa in what was billed as a rare and unprecedented glimpse of Amish life. A follow-up show a year later updated viewers on the exploits of the youth. Amish Grace, a fictional account of the story of Amish forgiveness following the 2006 shooting at the Nickel Mines Amish School, which aired in March 2010, was the Lifetime Movie Network’s most highly viewed film based on a real-life story.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the BBC in London, which had joined the hunt for the elusive Amish, aired two documentaries—Trouble in Amish Paradise (2009) and Leaving Amish Paradise (2010)—that followed the departure of two disgruntled families from Lancaster’s Amish community. British television’s Channel Four produced a four-episode reality show, Amish: The World’s Squarest Teens, in 2010. This UK version of Amish in the City enticed five midwestern Amish youth to explore London and its environs with some British teens. The BBC sequel, Living with the Amish (2011), brought six British youth to the United States to live in “Amish” homes.
With ex-Amish people and an assortment of actors, National Geographic aired Amish at the Altar in 2010 and followed it with a ten-part series in 2012, Amish: Out of Order, in which formerly Amish people interpret many aspects of Amish culture. In the fall of 2012, TLC launched a nine-episode reality television series, Breaking Amish, which followed five young adults (four Amish and one Mennonite) as they left their home communities and explored New York City. From daytime talk shows such as Oprah and Anderson Cooper to hundreds of YouTube videos and an assortment of productions for television, Amish youth and ex-Amish people became the guides for cyber-tourism in Amish Country in the twenty-first century.
Regardless of medium, accuracy, or content, Amish-themed “documentaries” and shows have received high scores for viewership and offered millions of people glimpses, however skewed, into Amish culture. Why do these excursions draw millions of viewers? It is the “A word,” explains Daniel Laikind of Stick Figure Productions, who produced many of these programs. “The public appears to have a never-ending fascination with the Amish … simply because they are different … [and] represent a way of life we wish we could live. It is a type of fantasy.”39
Ironically, the deeply held Amish virtues of humility and modesty that restrain them from seeking or participating in publicity only increases Amish otherness—making them bigger game and more attractive targets for the producers who relentlessly pursue them. Their aversion to publicity underscores their diametric difference from the multitude of other Americans who seek to promote themselves and their projects in the hopes of basking in the limelight that the Amish so dread.
One twenty-first-century form of virtual Amish tourism is the blog, which offers commentary, images, film, and audio clips of the Amish and Amish life to anyone, anywhere in the world, who searches for “Amish” on the Internet.40 Visitors to blogs often leave comments and even engage in lengthy “conversations” with the blogger and other readers. Some blogs have question-and-answer sections that allow newcomers to query the blogger and seasoned visitors to respond with their own anecdotes and expertise. Like a group on a tour bus, blog visitors share their tourist experience in the company of others.
Many blogs are, in fact, maintained by the same tourist agencies and enterprises that depend on tourism. Clicking on The Amish Blog, for example, will bring the virtual explorer to a website maintained by the “Pennsylvania Dutch Country Welcome Center” in Lancaster County.41 Moving past the blog options to “Lancaster PA home” provides a list of all the attractions offered to those who actually visit Lancaster. Other blogs support Amish-themed products. The popular syndicated column “The Amish Cook” is featured in The Amish Cook from Oasis Newsfeatures, a blog sponsored by the publisher of the column’s print version.42
Still other blogs are established and maintained by individuals. Perhaps the most well-known is Amish America, a blog by author and researcher Erik Wesner, who visits Amish communities and posts his observations and his interviews with scholars and authors on Amish-related topics.43 Some Amish-themed blogs, however, are less about the Amish than they are about a set of political views that the blogger links to the Amish. For example, the Amish Internet Blog describes itself as “promoting farm and country life with commentary about Amish issues.”44 It opens, however, with a list of pending legislation that the blogger identifies as “leftist” or “liberal” or impinging on American freedom.
Facebook has increasingly become a site of virtual tourism for people to connect around Amish-themed issues. “Amish Life: Celebrating the Simple Joy of All Things Amish” is a Facebook page billed as “an online community for all things Amish. Join the conversation and share your recipes, recommendations, and photos.”45 The page is actually sponsored by Zondervan, a Christian publisher that uses the page as a marketing tool for its Amish fiction. Viewers who “like” the page aren’t necessarily aware of that, of course, which underscores the v
irtual convergence of commercial and educational interests.
A few Amish people participate in the blogosphere. Several ex-Amish operate blogs and actively interact with their readers, answering questions and explaining various facets of Amish life.46 Even some church members collaborate with bloggers or those who maintain tourist websites by answering questions posed by readers. The anonymous Amish respondents participate in order to provide accurate information on Amish life. Although Amish people rarely have any way to militate against the construction of Amishness in a virtual world with no boundaries, their participation in blogging and the promotion of Amish values by non-Amish bloggers may increase the volume of their voice in the blogosphere.
Virtual tourism often spurs the real thing. Eitzen observes that “Witness turned out to be a huge box office success, reviving and arguably boosting a stagnant tourist industry.”47 Brad Igou, president of the Amish Experience at Plain & Fancy Farm in Lancaster County, notes, “The movie really put Lancaster County and the Amish culture out to a mass audience to a degree that had never been done before.”48 In recent years, the line between virtual and actual tourism has blurred. In 2005, on the twentieth anniversary of the release of Witness, Igou organized a tour of key sites in the film, including Intercourse, where the fictional detective John Book punched a tourist bully, and the farmhouse where Book hid out. This was followed in 2010 by another “Witness tour” that allowed visitors to see and photograph the farmhouse “as well as see Amish craftsmen completing a new farmhouse for the family,” a real-life variation on the barn-raising scene in the film.49 Igou explained, “Our tour recognizes that many people have become interested in Amish culture by watching a Hollywood movie and [this] gives them a chance to go beyond the movie and see how the Amish live here today.”50
Who’s Looking at Whom?
Some might see the willing participation of Amish families in the tourist industry as a cultural contradiction. Certainly, participation in the tourist industry has its dangers, as Douglas Turco warned in his study of Amish tourism: “Cultural tourism, by its very nature, is invasive, requiring host and guest cultures to interact. Amish youth, seeing their non-Amish counterparts wearing designer clothes and headphones plugged into portable compact disc players, while playing games like Tomb Raider on handheld computers, cannot help but be intrigued.” Turco went on to argue that by “commodifying their culture for tourism, the Amish seem to be giving mainstream society more of what it wants, while moving closer to the same societal flaws.”51
Whether tourism ultimately benefits or harms Amish culture remains open for debate. Although it may erode and pollute Amishness by bringing Amish people into closer contact with the English world, tourism may also confirm a visitor’s sense of superiority. Trollinger suggests that although tourists to Amish Country are attracted by coherent representations of the Amish that are reassuring and “authentic,” ultimately their visit reinforces their own sense of cultural superiority.52 The same is true for the virtual tourist, since films, like vacations, must end, and just as the tourist is generally happy to resume a “normal” life after the stress of vacation, the film viewer can be content with his or her own life after a virtual visit to the Amish world.
A key scene in Witness contrasts the boorish behavior of a bully tourist with the Amish farmer he picks on. The farmer, true to his pacifist values, will not fight back. The viewer can admire the striking “otherness” of such a response yet be reassured that Amish ideals are not practical because, in the end, the farmer needs the fugitive Philadelphia detective, who is wearing Amish clothing, to punch the bully. Like the detective, the virtual tourist returns to the real, non-Amish world convinced that force and aggression win out over pacifism.
If tourists find their own non-Amish identities reinforced by such experiences, Amish people may also have their values reaffirmed by interacting with tourists. Sociologist John A. Hostetler argued several decades ago that Amish people and tourist enterprises may both benefit by preserving clear boundaries between them.53 Tourism creates expectations for Amish behavior, and the words and images on tourist billboards reinforce the boundaries of Amish culture for the Amish themselves. Exposure to and participation in tourism may strengthen Amish identity by reminding Amish people of how different they are from the worldly visitors in their midst.54
Similarly, encounters with tourists may provide Amish people with “an insight into human problems in the outside world” and make them more content with their own culture. Deepak Chhabra considers the Amish response to tourism “negotiated reciprocity” because the Amish neither completely protect themselves from invading tourists nor acquiesce to their needs.55 The Amish have negotiated an arrangement that allows them to benefit economically from the Amish brand and at the same time guard their distinctive lifestyle.
By constructing Amish people as a “saving remnant” that preserve values and traditions that are disappearing in America, tourism may also help to bolster their separatist values in mainstream society.56 For example, in response to congressional hearings on child labor legislation that threatened to restrict Amish children from the workplace, Hannah Lapp, writing in the Wall Street Journal, argued that, instead of requiring the Amish to obey child labor laws, the Labor Department “would do better to study Amish child-labor practices as a guide to solving problems in child-spoiling mainstream society.”57 Similarly, in his analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Wisconsin v. Yoder, which allowed Amish children to forego high school, Shawn F. Peters suggests that Amish piety ostensibly had little bearing on the legal questions, but “it clearly struck a chord with the straitlaced [Chief Justice Warren] Burger,” who “gushed that ‘the Amish communities singularly parallel and reflect many of the virtues of Jefferson’s ideal of the “sturdy yeoman” who would form the basis of … a democratic society.’”58
The ambivalence of Amish people toward tourism and their role in it underscores the ambiguity of their relationship with modernity and popular culture. It also exemplifies the diverse responses of different Amish affiliations as they struggle to live in twenty-first-century America without fully embracing it. These factors highlight, as theorist Darya Maoz suggests, the ways in which the Amish gaze and the tourist gaze “exist, affect and feed each other and the encounter they produce.”59 Clearly, the jury is still out on exactly how Amish-themed tourism changes both the viewer and the viewed as both sides pursue their own paths to happiness.
V
THE FUTURE
CHAPTER 22
PURSUITS OF HAPPINESS
* * *
Asked how a book on the Amish in America should end, one fifteen-year-old New York Amish boy responded, “They lived happily ever after.”
“Amen,” added his older sister. “They lived happily ever after. Amen.”
* * *
The authors of Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think agree with the Amish teens.1 They predict that the Amish—and the rest of us—will live happily ever after because we are on the cusp of a host of technological innovations. The world’s nine billion people will drink clean water, eat healthy foods, live in decent homes, tap endless sources of energy, pursue free education, and be able to get, with a mere drop of their blood, a medical diagnosis anywhere in the world within a few minutes. All these miracles from the hands of technology will arrive, the authors claim, within the next twenty-five years.
We cannot know if these predictions will pan out, but we do know that in the future the Amish will live in a very different world than the one they inhabited in the last century. If horse-drawn transportation seems archaic today, it may look prehistoric a half century from now. How the Amish will fare in the face of a hypermodernity driven ever faster by technology is impossible to forecast. We can predict, however, that the Amish pursuit of happiness will encompass much more than technological innovation. But before turning to these issues, we recap how the Amish have grappled with the twentieth-century versions of solid modernity.
/> Shunning the Great Separator
We can read the Amish struggle with modernity as simply a protest against technology. On a deeper level, however, it has been a campaign to keep small-scale social units—based on kinship, neighborhood, and ethnicity—from being eroded by the currents of change that decontextualize people by sweeping them out of geographic communities.2 Fearing that riptides beneath modernity’s smooth surface would, in time, set their people adrift, the Amish have tenaciously tried to preserve their small, intimate congregations. Just as industrialization displaced work from the home and scattered the functions of education, work, worship, and leisure across several social spheres, modernity, which has been called the “great separator,” severs the connections among family, community, and place.3 The Amish response to certain new technologies reveals their fear of such fragmentation. Their aversion to photographs of individuals, telephones, automobiles, radio, and television is a protest against the decontextualization that divorces individuals from their social contexts or at least weakens communal ties.
Amish people found the idea of viewing a person out of context, unhitched from his or her local moorings, virtually idolatrous—a conviction that led to their taboo on photographs. Likewise, they resisted telephones, which separated voices from bodies, clothing, and social surroundings. The car, a super-decontextualizer, promised to obliterate geographical boundaries, expand social horizons, and free individuals from the parochialisms of local life. In Amish eyes, however, this all-American marvel was not a delight but a bulldozer that would upend every meaningful relationship. Likewise, television screens, with their flickering images of actors in make-believe settings, were, for the Amish, no more than optical illusions that intruded into the private spaces of homes and turned members of interactive communities into passive viewers.
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