A comparative global history of Mennonites from the ground up.
Winner of the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize by the Canadian Historical
Association, Nominee of the Margaret McWilliams Award by the
Manitoba Historical Society Mennonite farmers can be found in
dozens of countries spanning five continents. In this comparative
world-scale environmental history, Royden Loewen draws on a
multi-year study of seven geographically distinctive Anabaptist
communities around the world, focusing on Mennonite farmers in
Bolivia, Canada, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Russia, the United
States, and Zimbabwe. These farmers, who include Amish, Brethren in
Christ, and Siberian Baptists, till the land in starkly distinctive
climates. They absorb very disparate societal lessons while being
shaped by particular faith outlooks, historical memory, and the
natural environment. The book reveals the ways in which modern-day
Mennonite farmers have adjusted to diverse temperatures,
precipitation, soil types, and relative degrees of climate change.
These farmers have faced broad global forces of modernization
during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from
commodity markets and intrusive governments to technologies marked
increasingly by the mechanical, chemical, and genetic. Based on
more than 150 interviews and close textual analysis of memoirs,
newspapers, and sermons, the narrative follows, among others,
Zandile Nyandeni of Matopo as she hoes the spring-fed soils of
Matabeleland's semi-arid savannah; Vladimir Friesen of Apollonovka,
Siberia, who no longer heeds the dictates of industrial time of the
Soviet-era state farm; and Abram Enns of Riva Palacio, Bolivia, who
tells how he, a horse-and-buggy traditionalist, hired bulldozers to
clear-cut a farm in the eastern lowland forests to grow soybeans,
initially leading to dust bowl conditions. As Mennonites, Loewen
writes, these farmers were raised with knowledge of the historic
Anabaptist teachings on community, simplicity, and peace that stood
alongside ideas on place and sustainability. Nonetheless,
conditioned by gender, class, ethnicity, race, and local values,
they put their agricultural ideas into practice in remarkably
diverse ways. Mennonite Farmers is a pioneering work that brings
faith into conversation with the land in distinctive ways.
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