A New Amish Community Is Founded Every Three-And-A-Half Weeks in US, Experts Estimate

A new census of the Amish population in the United States estimates that a new Amish community is founded, on average, about every 3 ½ weeks, and shows that more than 60 percent of all existing Amish settlements have been founded since 1990.

This pattern suggests the Amish are growing more rapidly than most other religions in the United States, researchers say. Unlike other religious groups, however, the growth is not driven by converts joining the faith, but instead can be attributed to large families and high rates of baptism.

In all, the census counts almost 251,000 Amish in the United States and Ontario, Canada, dispersed among 456 settlements, the communities in which members live and worship. The 1990 census estimated that there were 179 settlements in the United States.

If the growth of the Amish population continues at its current rate, the Ohio State University researchers predict that the census could exceed 1 million Amish and 1,000 settlements shortly after 2050, and these numbers will bring economic, cultural, social and religious change to the rural areas that attract Amish settlement.

Among the changes the researchers predict: Amish will buy up land vacated by farmers in rural areas close to community services, but the availability of farmland might not keep pace with population growth. This means many Amish men will likely look for nonfarm jobs such as woodworking and construction trades, which could affect land prices and potentially enhance local economies through the establishment of business startups.

The census restricts the count to Amish among the "Old Orders," those who maintain a horse-and-buggy lifestyle and avoid or limit their use of most modern technologies.

The researchers who compiled the census used a variety of sources to produce this count, including current and archival settlement directories and statistics from publications that cover some of the largest Amish communities, as well as by calculating estimates based on research-based facts about Amish settlement characteristics.

It took about two years to develop the census, which was commissioned by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies for the recently released 2010 U.S. Religion Census.

"The Amish are one of the fastest-growing religious groups in North America," said Joseph Donnermeyer, professor of rural sociology in Ohio State's School of Environment and Natural Resources, who led the census project. "They're doubling their population about every 21 to 22 years, primarily because they produce large families and the vast majority of daughters and sons remain in the community as adults baptized into the faith, starting their own families and sustaining their religious beliefs and practices."

Donnermeyer compiled the count with Elizabeth Cooksey, professor of sociology, and Cory Anderson, a graduate student in rural sociology, both at Ohio State. Anderson presented a paper July 27 in Chicago at the annual meeting of the Rural Sociological Society.

The researchers describe the Amish as largely misunderstood based on their limited depiction on television reality shows or in the news media. The Amish represent a branch of the Anabaptist (or rebaptized) movement dating to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Based on their interpretation of the Christian bible, the Amish settle where they can separate themselves from the world, minimize disturbance from others and use the land for farming or other livelihoods, Donnermeyer said.

The church is central to Amish life and is intentionally small-scale in its organization in keeping with their religious philosophy of separation, Donnermeyer said. Larger settlements are composed of multiple church districts, which typically consist of a few dozen families whose baptized members use a lottery system to select leaders. Worship services are held in members' homes.

The absence of a centralized church registry makes it complicated to produce an accurate estimate of the Amish population, Donnermeyer noted, but he said this census is likely the most comprehensive scholarly count of the Amish population to date.

He and his colleagues relied on more than 60 settlement directories they obtained from the Heritage Historical Library operated by the Mennonite Church and three publications that cover news about various Amish communities, both large and small. Those publications are The Budget in Sugarcreek, Ohio, The Diary in Bart, Pa., and Die Botschaft in Millersburg, Pa.

The researchers also used demographic data from established settlements to produce average household estimates for newer or similar communities that had not published directories. A settlement, by definition, must contain at least three households and include members who are able to hold a church service; these criteria were the basis for estimating the population of settlements that were less than a year old.

Baptism into the Amish church is offered only to adults -- a fundamental tenet of the Anabaptist movement. Of the 250,784 Amish adherents identified in the census, 145,235 are considered nonmembers because they are children who have not yet been baptized.

The census provides Amish population figures for each state with at least one Amish community. The researchers included Ontario, Canada, home to 15 settlements and almost 4,400 Amish, in the census. The Amish live in 29 states, mostly in the Midwest and Great Lakes region but also as far south as Florida and Texas, into the northeast reaches of Maine and as far west as western Montana.

According to the research, Ohio is home to the most Amish community members -- 60,233 -- and Pennsylvania is a close second, with 59,078 Amish residents. Indiana has 44,831 Amish citizens. The 456 settlements contain a total of 1,868 Amish church districts of the "Old Orders."

No state has seen more recent growth in settlements than New York, where 15 new settlements have been established since 2010. But 34 of Ohio's 54 settlements have been founded since 1990, a trend that contributes to the state's large Amish population, Donnermeyer said. Ohio is also home to Holmes County, the U.S. county housing the highest percentage of Amish, with 42 percent. The Greater Holmes County settlement, which sprawls across six counties (Holmes, Wayne, Tuscarawas, Coshocton, Stark and Ashland), is the largest settlement, with nearly 30,000 Amish, followed by the Lancaster/Chester County settlement in southeastern Pennsylvania.

"My guess is that in 15 years, we'll witness a county whose population is majority Amish, and Holmes County is likely to gain that distinction first. Perhaps LaGrange County in Indiana will not be far behind," Donnermeyer said.
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References:

Science Daily. 2012. "A New Amish Community Is Founded Every Three-And-A-Half Weeks in US, Experts Estimate". Science Daily. Posted: July 27, 2012. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120727131544.htm

Viewing Illegal Immigration Through Desert Debris

In the litter scattered across the desert floor, professor Jason De León finds truths about the miserable business of illegal immigration.

We don’t see or hear the border patrol agents until they’re almost on top of us. There are two of them, both white; one older and wiry, the other young and beefy. They are dressed in olive drab uniforms. The wiry one gives our little group of four the once-over. “We thought we might get some action today,” he says, “but you guys look all right.” He sounds just a touch disappointed.

“What are you all up to?” the beefy one asks.

“We’re out for a hike,” says Jason De León.

De León, 34, is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and the founder of an undertaking called the Undocumented Migrant Project. Since 2008, he has been studying illegal migration from Mexico into southern Arizona. He doesn’t volunteer that information, though. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.

“Seen anyone out here?” the wiry one asks.

“Not yet,” says Bob Kee. Kee is a volunteer in the Tucson Samaritans, a group whose members hike the most heavily used stretches of desert in search of migrants who might need food, water, or urgent medical attention. The Samaritans focus on preventing deaths and try to avoid either assisting or impeding the migrants on their trek. Covering Kee’s backpack is a large red T-shirt emblazoned with a white cross and the word “Samaritanos.” It is not subtle.

“You guys OK for water and food?” the wiry one asks.

“We have enough,” Kee says. “How about you? Do you guys need any water or anything?”

“We’re fine,” the wiry one answers. A few beats pass in silence. “Well, we’d best be gettin’ on,” he finally says. “You folks have a nice hike.”

As the two agents start to leave, the beefy one turns back. “If you find anything that might interest us, you be sure to tell us,” he says.

We murmur that we will. The agent grins at us. He knows that we won’t.

*************

For de león, the subject of migration across the southern border is both broadly American and narrowly personal. He is the grandson of an illegal immigrant, and he grew up in the border states of Texas and California. His parents were in the U.S. Army (his father was a staff sergeant, his mother a warrant officer), and being an army brat meant he moved a lot. “It creates a disposition toward understanding cultural differences,” he says.

In 1995, De León started his undergraduate education at UCLA and immersed himself in anthropology and archaeology. “I’d always been interested in archaeology,” he recalls, “even before I knew what it was.” After graduating in 2001 with a major in anthropology, he moved across the country, enrolling at Pennsylvania State University for his graduate education. He earned his doctorate in 2008, having completed a dissertation titled “The Lithic Industries of San Lorenzo-Tenochtitlán: An Economic and Technological Study of Olmec Obsidian.” It concerned the trade of obsidian blades (that is, blades made from volcanic glass). As part of his research, he had to pick through thousands of tiny rocks. “It was sometimes a struggle to stay excited,” he says.

After De León earned his Ph.D., he decided to take a break from archaeology and accepted an offer to be a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle. The job gave him the leeway to be an academic without having to bore into his immediate specialty. He embraced it, and taught, among other things, a popular course on the anthropology of rock ’n’ roll. Since he had been the singer and songwriter for a punk band called Youth in Asia in the 1990s (and currently sings in an alt-country band called The Wilcox Hotel), the work tapped into something appealing and immediate.

Yet archaeology stayed with him. In 2007, while a graduate student, he had helped to excavate an Olmec site in Mexico. Many of the people working on the project had been migrants to the U.S., and he got to hear their stories. “I started to see that there was a lot more going on with migration than people knew,” he says.

Then, some archaeologists who were working in southern Arizona mentioned to De León that they frequently had to dig through piles of what they saw as trash that migrants had left behind. “They said that I should do an archaeological study on that stuff,” he says. “They were probably joking.”

But he took their advice seriously and headed to the Coronado National Forest. He found sites littered with a few plastic water bottles under bushes or cactuses, and then others with hundreds of discarded shoes, clothes, backpacks. What was trash to others was, to him, the archaeology of undocumented migration — the visible remnants of a largely invisible phenomenon.

So he launched the Undocumented Migrant Project in 2009. Combining ethnographic research (in the form of collecting oral histories) and archeological research (combing through modern-day sites), it would be a long-term study of people and their cultures, through their artifacts. “I needed to find a way to get back to archaeology that I found personally meaningful,” De León says. “This was also a way for it to be relevant to contemporary issues.”

• •  • • • • • • • • • • • • •

We are standing in the coronado national forest, about 10 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Off to the northwest, Baboquivari Peak rises out of a distant mountain range. “Migrants make sure to keep it on their left as they walk,” De León says. “If it’s on the left, they know they’re going north.”

Each summer, De León travels to this part of Arizona to do field work. Today, we are just four, but De León often brings a larger group. In 2010, he became an assistant professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and he often has students with him. They stay in Arivaca, a small town about 11 miles north of the border. From there, they hike out to map sites and collect artifacts — a process that frequently includes hauling out pounds of smelly debris in garbage bags. De León catalogs the items, trying to get a sense of the gender and age of the person carrying this camouflage backpack, or who wore through the sole of that knock-off Nike Air Jordan.

The artifacts are part of an evolving story. In the past, most migrants came to the United States through border cities, not through the wilderness. At the point of entry between San Diego and Tijuana, migrants often made what local Border Patrol agents called “banzai runs” — frantic dashes across the border, sometimes in groups as large as 50, into oncoming traffic on Interstate 5. But the number of agents has more than doubled since 2004, from 10,000 to 21,370, of which 18,000 are deployed along the U.S.-Mexico border. So, illegal attempts to cross the border are happening in increasingly remote areas.

Today, almost half of all migrants try to cross in the Sonoran Desert. It’s prodigiously dry (less than 2 inches of rain annually in parts) and prodigiously hot (120 degrees Fahrenheit is not uncommon). Since 2001, more than 2,100 migrants have died here; last year was one of the worst on record, with 249 deaths. This, says De León, is one of the details lost in the recent spate of stories on the decline of illegal migration: fewer people may be crossing, but proportionally more of those who do cross are dying.

As we make our way through the desert, we come across countless empty packets of ephedrine pills and cans of energy drinks along with the water bottles. These are provided by coyotes (smugglers of migrants) in order to hurry people across the terrain. The water bottles are black, because migrants think that black will make the containers harder to detect. “There’s a real lack of understanding of the true capacity and practices of the Border Patrol,” De León says. “Agents use ground sensors now, aerial drones, thermal imaging — and the migrants still paint their bottles black.”

When it comes to U.S. efforts to control the border, numbers don’t always mean what they appear to mean, and rumors and misconceptions are rife. “Archaeology has been really helpful in demystifying the process,” he says. The sites tell him a lot about how the migrants travel, providing details that interviews do not. Similarly, the interviews he conducts often clear up mysteries that emerge when De León is cataloging a site. The ethnography and archeology, he says, “feed back into each other very well.” For example, De León knows through interviews why the water bottles are painted black. He also knows that six factories in Mexico make water bottles that are specially designed for desert crossings — gallon jugs the size and shape of Clorox bottles. And several of those companies have started to sell their bottles made from black plastic. This is a change that has occurred within the past two years. “The objects themselves say a lot about the migration process,” De León says. One company even puts an outline of Baboquivari Peak on its label. As De León points out, wryly, it’s hard to get more obvious than that.

The factory-blackened bottles, camouflage clothes, and backpacks — all likely found in the well-stocked stalls in the Mexican border towns of Nogales and Altar — attest to an unmistakable professionalization in the border-jumping business. For De León, to see these products as discarded artifacts reminds him of the humanity beneath the politics.“I want to have a good data set,” he says. “But I also want to understand the real costs that migrants have to pay, so that their lives are less anonymous.”

We are about 20 yards above the trail, where there is a small, makeshift shrine: two branches tied together with rope to make a cross, leaning among a small pile of stones. Kee tells De León that he re-wrapped the cross with duct tape. The rope was fraying. “Technically,” De León tells me later, “when he did that, he changed an archaeological site.” He shrugs. “It happens.” Of course, by entering it into the record as is, one could add that instead of just being a migrant’s lonely gesture, it became evidence that an American was moved by his encounter, sufficiently so that he tried to preserve it.

“As archaeologists, we can sometimes be a little esoteric, or not very good at connecting our research to broader issues that everyday people can understand,” De León says. He is thrashing through a tangle of spindly ocotillo plants, also known as the devil’s coach whip. Each is more than 10 feet tall and leafy from recent rains. Two months ago, Kee found several human bones here, scattered about the hillside. He has been back several times, each time finding a few more bones. He collects them and takes them to a coroner, on the off chance that one day they might be identified. The four of us pick through the rocks and vegetation, gathering whatever bone chips and fragments lie next to the trail. De León finds a bicuspid. I find a 4-inch section of rib. It is a morbid search.

Such is the challenge of archaeology of the unfolding present. If this were purely a study site, De León would have laid a grid over the hillside. He would have had us go over the site on our hands and knees, square by square. Each bone we found would have been meticulously cataloged, its position noted with GPS. But we are in a more fluid space — not quite archaeological, not quite crime scene, not quite garbage dump, not quite wilderness. Kee brings out a small Ziploc, so that our bits and pieces can be added to the already gathered remains. We drop them in. They fill roughly half the bag.
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References:

Wagner, Eric. 2011. "Viewing Illegal Immigration Through Desert Debris". Miller-McCune. Posted: November 1, 2011. Available online: http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/viewing-illegal-immigration-through-desert-debris-36731/

Immigration tracked through desert detritus

Discarded possessions reveal dangers of journey from Mexico into Arizona.

Every year, thousands of undocumented migrants make the dangerous crossing from Mexico to Arizona in the United States through the Sonoran Desert. One anthropologist is hoping to demystify these clandestine crossings by collecting discarded belongings and mapping rest stops, and analysing these using scientific methods.

In the United States, debate about illegal immigration is coloured by myth, misconception and a paucity of scientific data, says Jason De León, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

"We've talked about migration quite a bit in academia, but it's mostly sort of sociological or reliant on survey data after the fact," says De León. He estimates that around 200 people die near the border between Arizona and Mexico each year.

Just trying to do research in such an environment hints at the hazards of migration. "I've gotten out there, gotten in trouble, just borderline about to have sunstroke or something like that. You get a sense of how difficult it is," he says.

Since 2008, he has analysed around 100 sites used by migrants for rest stops in a roughly 50-kilometre stretch of desert between Nogales, Mexico, and Arivaca in Arizona. Working with students, he maps each site, notes what it was used for - whether people have made beds, for example - and records all the discarded objects. He has collected more than 6 tonnes of items, including backpacks, shoes, first-aid kits, clothes and water bottles.

Such artefacts help De León identify trends in migration and estimate the number of people making the journey. The presence of women's and children's shoes, for example, shows that it's not just adult men crossing the desert.

Nearer to Arivaca, sites become larger and clothing and backpacks replace food packaging in the litter. "Their guide will say, 'Ok now you gotta clean up. You look like you've just walked through the desert.' So you change your clothes, brush your teeth, wash your face - that's when you get a lot of this stuff left behind," De León explains. He presented his findings at the Society for American Archaeology's annual meeting in Sacramento, California, on 1 April.

Blood, sweat and tears

De León has also spent months in a migrant shelter in the Mexican border town of Nogales, interviewing those about to begin the journey through the desert and those recently deported back to Mexico.

In total, his data show that migrants circumvent stricter border controls — such as increased patrols or fences — by using routes that are more remote and dangerous. "Enforcement strategies that create suffering and death are clearly no match for the hunger and poverty that drive migrants to the United States," he says.

"This is a groundbreaking type of research. De León is pushing the archaeological envelope," says archaeologist Ran Boytner of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "His research will have a very strong impact, both in and out of the discipline. It takes a lot of guts to do what he's doing."

De León now anticipates expanding his survey areas in Arizona, and possibly including sites in California, Texas and New Mexico.

Studying these objects humanizes undocumented migration, says José Antonio Lucero, a political scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Most people don't understand what drives a person to leave his or her home and embark on a risky journey.

"Jason can say a lot about the whole experience through the artefacts and the folks he meets," he says. "It's a world that we don't know very well. I hope the project leads to a more enlightened conversation about immigration."
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References:

Drake, Nadia. 2011. "Immigration tracked through desert detritus". Nature News. Posted: April 11, 2011. Available online: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110411/full/news.2011.225.html

The REAL ‘Stuff White People Like’

What is it that makes a culture unique? How are whites, blacks, Asians, or whoever different from everybody else? What tastes, interests, and concepts define an ethnic group? And is there any way to make fun of other races in public and get away with it?

These are big questions, and here's how we answered them.

We selected 526,000 OkCupid users at random and divided them into groups by their (self-stated) race. We then took all these people's profile essays (280 million words in total!) and isolated the words and phrases that made each racial group's essays statistically distinct from the others'.

For instance, it turns out that all kinds of people list sushi as one of their favorite foods. But Asians are the only group who also list sashimi; it's a racial outlier. Similarly, as we shall see, black people are 20 times more likely than everyone else to mention soul food, whereas no foods are distinct for white people, unless you count diet coke.

Using this kind of analysis, we were able find the interests, hobbies, tastes, and self-descriptions that are specially important to each racial group, as determined by the words of the group itself. The information in this article is not our opinion. It's data, aggregated from the essays of half a million real people.

In general, I won't comment too much on these lists, because the whole point of this piece is to let the groups speak for themselves, but I have to say that the mind of the white man is the world's greatest sausagefest. Unless you're counting Queens of the Stone Age, there is not even one vaguely feminine thing on his list, and as far as broad categories go we have: sweaty guitar rock, bro-on-bro comedies, things with engines, and dystopias.

As for the interests of white women, you have romance novels, some country music, and a broad selection of Good Housekeeping type stuff. It's also amazing the extent to which their list shows a pastoral or rural self-mythology: bonfires, boating, horseback riding, thunderstorms. I remind you that OkCupid's user base is almost all in large cities, where to one degree or another, if you find yourself doing much of any of these things, civilization has come to an end.

If I had to choose over-arching themes for white people's lists, for men, I'd go with "frat house" and for women, "escapism." Whether one begot the other is a question I'll leave to the reader.

Hopefully it's been obvious that the font-size of a phrase indicates the relative frequency with which it appears. So, toggling between black men and black women above, you can see that while soul food is important to both, but it's really, really important to the women. In fact, soul food and black women is the single strongest phrase/group pair we found.

The above lists also make it clear that, regardless of whether Jesus himself was black, his most vocal followers definitely are. Religious expressions weren't among the top phrases for any of the other races, but they're all over the place for black men and (especially) black women, for whom 13 of the top 50 phrases are religious. Black people are more than twice as likely than average to mention their faith in their profiles.

Finally, it's worth noting that of the four lists we've seen so far, black women's is the only one to explicitly include someone of another race: Justin Timberlake.

Double finally, how bold is it that I am cool is the second most typical phrase for black men?

Visit the website and see the lists for the White, Black and Hispanics. You have to click on the female/male icon to pull up that gender's list.

What is missing is the growing and diverse hybrids -- people of mixed ethnicity. People of mixed parentage. Research into this group of people seemed to climax in the 90s, just in time for the global hybrid icon: Barak Obama to be elected President of the United States. Two movie action heroes also emerged in the 90s of mixed ethnicity. That is, Vin Diesel and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. When will it filter down to these type of sites?
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References:

Rudder, Christian. 2010. "The REAL ‘Stuff White People Like’". OK Trends. Posted: September 8, 2010. Available online: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-real-stuff-white-people-like/