Craftsmanship and Work Ethic
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By living in closed communities where custom and a strong sense of togetherness prevail, the Amish have formed an integrated way of life and a folklike culture. Continuity of conformity and custom is assured and the needs of the individual from birth to death are met within an integrated and shared system of meanings. Oral tradition, custom, and conventionality play an important part in maintaining the group as a functioning whole. To the participant, religion and custom are inseparable. Commitment and culture are combined to produce a stable human existence.

Smallness of Scale. The basic social unit of the Amish community is small. Wherever the Amish live, this primary, self-governing unit is the “church district.” The rules of life are determined by this face-to-face group, which is kept small by the ceremonial functions of assembling in a single household and by the limitation imposed by horse-and-carriage travel. In most places the Amish live adjacent to non-Amish farm neighbors, but all Amish households in geographic proximity form a unit. This small unit, form thirty to forty households, is the congregation. Households take turns hosting the biweekly religious services in their homes as there is no central building or place set aside for ceremonial functions. Families may migrate from one settlement to another, or from one state to another, but in so doing they affiliate with local district. A settlement may be large, but the basic social unit remains small and indigenous.

The rules are formulated by each district cover the range of individual experience. In this little community, which survives by keeping the world out, there are many taboos, and material traits of culture become symbolic. Conformity to styles of dress is important.

Smallness of scale is assured in Amish life by the multiple functions of the family. When asked about the size of his congregation an Amish bishop thinks in terms of families, not individuals. Persons who make up the society are associated with genealogical position. Most people in this society have orderly kinship and coherent social connections with one another so that virtually the whole society forms a body of relatives. Outsiders who join the Amish community break not only with Amish beliefs but also with social and kinship ties.

The Amish people maintain a human rather than an organizational scale in their daily lives. They resisted the large, Consolidated school ad proposition that big schools ( or farms) were better than small ones. A bureaucracy that places pupils together within narrow age limits and emphasizes science and technology to the exclusion of sharing values and personal responsibility is not tolerated. The Amish appreciate thinking that makes the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them. When human groups and units of work become too large for them, a sense of estrangement sets in. When this happens the world becomes intelligible to them and they cease participation in what is meaningless.

The attempt to retain self-suffiency is associated with agrarianism and occupations close to nature. Closeness to the soil, to animals, to plants, and to weather is consistent with the Amish outlook on life and with the limit outside contact. Hard work, thrift, mutual aid and repulsion of city ways such as leisure and nonproductive spending find support in the Bible and are emphasized in day-to-day experience. With practical knowledge and work, a good living can be made from soil: and this, the Amish contend, is the only fit place for a family.

With the passing of long years of suppression, the descendants of the Anabaptists changed their goals form reforms to ways and means physical survival. It was under these conditions that they learned the disciplines of mutual aid, intensive agriculture, thrift, and toil, qualities for which they were later sought by emperors and princes to transform wastelands into productive soil. Thus the Swiss Brethren, including the Amish, became “the quiet people of the land” and formed agrarian cultural islands.

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