The Amish: Shunned

For this week’s posting, I’d like to focus on The Amish: Shunned an American Experience documentary that I watched through the PBS iPad app. Shunned presents an extreme example of the logic through which cultures use judgments of taste to uphold and reinforce their cultural values and to separate insiders from outsiders. Telling the stories of several people who chose to leave the closed Amish lifestyle, the documentary details the process of Amish cultural ostracism against those who will not adhere to the church’s strict regulations. This institutionalized ostracism has two functions. The first is to make the transgressor realize the depth of their fall in hopes that they will repent and rejoin the fold as a reformed citizen. The second is to limit what the community sees as the threat of cultural contamination from “the dominant American culture.”

Shunned is clearly filmed from an outsider’s perspective, sympathizing most with those who have severed ties to the Amish way of life, so it inevitably is guilty of the same judgmental logic as its Amish subjects. In antagonistically presenting Amish shunning as a problem that afflicts the stability of the family the film quite obviously normalizes and reinforces the lifestyle outside the Amish community. Still, the presentation of this test case, which sits at the borderline of our culture, is instructive. As Bordieu observes, aesthetics are tightly entwined with notions of lifestyle, and Amish shunning offers an example of a practice that literalizes and ritualizes the feelings of disgust that Tyler discusses in her article or that the majority of us likely feel while watching Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (e.g. Amish cannot take objects from the hands of the shunned, whom they describe as “dirty”). Taste is something at once deeply affective and deeply conservative, and I do wonder if there is a way to reclaim it wholly in the name of difference without preserving its preservationalist tendencies (subcultural formations such as camp suggest that there might be, but I am still a bit skeptical).

So, even though the documentary presents the Amish people as “outsiders,” the anxieties that are outlined in Shunned, relayed by the Amish interviewees (who remain off-camera), feel all too familiar. As outlined in Holohan’s article, the stability of the family has been called into question, even within dominant culture, as “romantic notions of ‘forever’ have been lost in an era of equal rights, cohabitation, separation, divorce and step-families, as people attempt to take ownership of their own life stories” (31). The need to view “correct” depictions of normality (and, by proxy, see others living “correct” lives) is rooted in a sense of tradition that is not reflective of social conditions yet somehow contributive to the ways we choose to live. So, while Shunned presents its subject matter as an outside case, in its observations that taste forges citizenship and in its conception of bad taste as a form of threat it strikes me as a mirror reflection of our own anxieties and cultural behavior.

You can watch The Amish: Shunned online here:  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/shunned/