Anthro Reality Television Shows About Amish Lifestyle

Anthro

Reality television shows about Amish lifestyle and culture reveal an eerily ironic fascination of one of the only ethnic groups in the United States to deliberately eschew technology. The use of technology to capture ethnographic data on the Amish communities in America is therefore as problematic as the reality television shows are at trying to capture Amish life using the very tools the Amish shun. In "Researching the 'Un-Digital' Amish community: methodological and ethical reconsiderations for human subjects research," Tabetha Adkins claims that ethnographers and anthropologists need to develop and implement more flexible methodologies that are not only more ethical, but also more accurate.

The author establishes her biases as a self-declared "technophile" who originally imposed technological tools upon Amish subjects in a sort of active display of colonialism or cultural imperialism (Adkins, 2011, p. 39). Adkins (2011) claims that researchers have become dependent on their technological tools for observation, data collection, measurement, and analysis. Moreover, ethnographers hoping to collect data from a non-technological population group are using emails and other methods that are anathema to the Amish. As Adkins (2011) puts it, "digital texts and the technology that creates and displays those texts are foreign, odd, and perhaps even dangerous," (p. 39). The Amish have cleverly and admirably preserved an intact cultural and ethnic identity without succumbing to the dominant culture, as would be otherwise predicted. Some of the ways the Amish have achieved their goal of resiliency and resisted assimilations include the pervasiveness of religion in Amish society; the entrenchment of social norms; and the aggressive penetration of Amish languages throughout the community. In "The English Effect' on Amish language and literacy practices," Adkins (2011) notes that language is absolutely equated with identity in the Amish community. This in itself is nothing unusual. However, the Amish children have been exposed to "English only" written literacy in the American public school system. The method by which the Amish have demonstrated resilience in spite of tremendous pressures has been to create three unique domains for language use in the community. Those three domains include the home, the church, and the relations with the outside world. In the home, Amish speak Pennsylvania Dutch, a variation on Swiss German. In Church, the Amish speak High German for liturgical reasons. The Amish are also fluent in English as a lingua franca. What is unique about Pennsylvania Dutch and High German is that they are primarily oral tongues for the Amish. As such, these languages function as "social practice," (p. 25). The Amish vision of oral literacy is not mastery of the technical aspects of language such as grammar and composition; the Amish vision of oral literacy is the use of language to facilitate community ties, and resist assimilation.