The Riddle of Amish Culture

Donald B. Kraybill is a scholar of Anabaptist and Amish studies, and this Johns Hopkins University Press book is his standard scholarly study of Amish culture, examining how Amish communities negotiate modernity through selective, deliberate limits on technology rather than blanket rejection of it. Its strength is that Kraybill draws on decades of sustained fieldwork among Amish communities, making the book the standard academic reference on the subject. Its limit is that Amish practice varies considerably by settlement and affiliation, so a claim about one specific Amish community's particular rules needs to be checked against that community rather than generalized from this broader survey.