Free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Email Antje Petty (apetty@wisc.edu) to receive a link.
Links will be sent on March 24, 2021
This presentation examines the twenty-first-century economic shift in Amish communities from local producers and artisans to participants in a national market system. One example is the dramatically increased presence, and in many Pennsylvania locations the domination, of Amish vendors in farmers’ markets. Although it might look as if they have changed their traditional values centered on closeness to the land, the Amish have created a special niche that mediates between the slow capitalism of a producer or communitarian farm economy and the fast capitalism of a market system in the digital age. Not motivated by profit, they have forced a re-examination of cultural factors in changing relations of the Amish to “the English” and indeed within Amish society.
Simon J. Bronner is Dean of the College of General Studies and Distinguished Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. The recipient of the Pennsylvania German Society’s Award of Merit, he is the co-editor of Pennsylvania Germans: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (Johns Hopkins University Press) and contributor to Writing the Amish: The Worlds of John Hostetler (Penn State Press).