The Amish in the American Imagination, by David Weaver-Zercher
In the most vivid of all Amish urban legends, three bonneted women from Lancaster County enter the elevator of a New York City skyscraper. Just before the doors close, a huge black man, accompanied by a Doberman straining at the end of a leash, boards the elevator with them and in a commanding tone says a single word: "Sit!" Without hesitation the Amish women collapse on the floor at his feet. Later that same day in a midtown restaurant the women finish their lunch and prepare to pay their bill. The waiter comes over and says, pointing at another table, "Ladies, put your money away. Reggie Jackson just picked up your tab." They turn around to look and see that the big man with the Doberman is smiling in their direction.
Although this story doesn't appear in David Weaver-Zercher's new book on the Amish in American culture, it is precisely this sort of popular mediation of the plain people that interests Weaver-Zercher, an assistant professor of American religious history at Messiah College. He is not so much concerned with describing how the Amish came to be or who they are in belief and practice as with how they have been represented. A dutiful cultural critic, he has scoured the American media for the images that have come to us through romance novels, children's literature, Hollywood films, kitschy Lancaster County tourist brochures, the words and pictures found on food labels and the music videos of Weird Al Yankovich.
As the author explains, "unlike [in] other scholarly treatments of Amish life, the main characters in this study are not the Amish themselves, but rather outsiders who, for various reasons, took it upon themselves to represent the Amish to other Americans." In their attempts to show the Amish to a wider audience, those "outsiders" have demonstrated attitudes toward their subject ranging from snooty condescension and contempt all the way to admiration and nostalgic sentimentality. Depending on the outsider's bias, the Amish have been perceived as everything from dolts and perverts to pure and noble rustics, as wayward sectarians out of touch with the Radical Reformation that set their course, to the noblest specimens of American simplicity and virtue. Weaver-Zercher's efforts to show how the Amish have functioned in what he calls "the American imagination" deliver multiple impressions.
