Settling the Boundaries

ne Je'ren t(w)eschen twee Jrense

This essay is a purely brainstorming essay used to critic Seth Schwartz, Marilyn Montgomery and Ervin Briones’ The Role of Identity in Acculturation and Assimilation of Immigrant People.  As such, this is neither a scholarly essay nor submitted for classwork, discussion or publication, rather just some amateur theoretical doodling mosty intended to help process and develop other concepts for further development, review or rejection.  Danke. 

    As part of the assumptions set into their thesis, Schwartz, Montgomery and Briones (collecting ‘The Authors), review prominent Modern and Postmodern definitions of their key terms (excluding ‘immigrant’ which seems to be relatively accepted):  Acculturation, cultural identity, culture, Personal identity and Social identity.  They seemingly desire a more technocratic or applied theoretical tone rather than a theory building perspective and preference for stability and structure in these definitions, desiring that it be “possible to define acculturation and identity in terms precise enough to support specific theoretical propositions, calls for empirical research, and rationales for interventions to promote identity development in acculturating individuals.” (p 2). 

    A short criticism is apparent immediately in their assumptions that acculturating is a positive goal and that they, as members of the dominant recipient culture, are in a position to and morally empowered to intervene.  Postmodernists should be leaping up from chairs and rattling glasses in alarm.

    While they slough off liability to theoretical criticism against Postmodernism supplied by M. J. Chandler, and R. Brubaker and F. Cooper in a manner that would make an American Congressperson blush, they do have a point – but one that I think we can help mitigate.

Rural Jews, Urban Mennonites and Diaspora Identities

Actor Rob Morrow as Dr. Joel Fleischman

Northern Exposure, ep 3.13 

Things Become Extinct 

(20 Jan 1992, No. 77513)

Dr. Joel Fleischman: I'm not a vanishing breed.
Ed Chigliak: Well, you're Jewish. That's pretty rare.

"This is not homesickness.  This is more than homesickness.  I'm facing serious personality meltdown.  Joel Fleischman, the Jewish doctor from New York.  You take that away and who am I?  What am I?"
"Well, Fleischman, just forgetting a few subway stops..."
"This is just the tip of the iceberg.  Don't you understand?  It's like 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.'  I'm being replaced by some insidious replicant, a Joel Fleischman look-alike that talks about crop rotation and carburators.  I've got to stop it before it's too late." (sic)
        - Joel to Maggie

"You had me do a two hour turn around to Anchorage to pick up *bagels*? They were supposed to be medical supplies!"  - Maggie, to Joel

“You know, I tried.  I really did.  I gave it my best shot.  It just didn’t work.  Scratch the plum pudding, there’s a matzo ball underneath.  I’m a Jew.  That’s all there is to it.”  Joel to Maggie after dismantling his first, and unsuccessful, Christmas Tree and re-establishing it in Maggie’s front yard.

   As a Postmodern prairie dweller, I was raised on episodes of the Beachcombers, Ann of Avonlea and Little House on the Prairie with a few reruns of Grizzly Adams.  In college, it was reruns of Northern Exposure that fired my imagination and appreciation for the world I left behind – and when I had to return to that country for to bury the dead, it was Northern Exposure that enabled me to laugh painfully at the rapid, if semi-consensual change from downtown Chicago to the mountains of Montana’s Yellowstone.  Where Fleischman missed his bagels, I longed for my bitter Starbucks coffee.  Fleischman longed for his lost Bordeaux, I missed my Art Institute – Fleischman’s golf course was my softball fields.  All in all, a little bit different, yet very much the same.

   Apart from humor, Northern Exposure exemplified numerous socio-ethnic situations and struggles for identity as individuals, as communities and as historic ethnic groups assimilating into something new – both an inclusive new and an often exclusive new.  Ed Chigliak’s statement Fleischman about being a vanishing breed was both a statement as to Fleischman’s personal Jewish identity and Fleischman’s need to adapt to new realities and to establish himself as something new – not exclusive of his Jewish New Yorker past, but rather inclusive of the new person Fleischman was becoming outside of the social and cultural reinforcements of the ethnic Jewish diaspora.  Tellingly, much of Fleishman’s humor stemmed from his travails to adapt to the Postmodern reality as an individual while longing for the communal support of the Modern New York Jewish community.

Multi-Axis Identities, the Lustre Synthesis

Multi-Axis Identities as a Unifying Concept:

Note:  This is a reflection on the organizational difficulties in mapping out an organizational structure for a proposed cultural and spiritual history of the EMB church or Brüderthaler Mennonite culture.

    While I understand previous thoughts regarding a structure based on the name changes, I am not sure that this as effective for delineating the generational shifts in perception of the conference, the self-identity of the membership, or the growth stages of the conference.

    I would recommend an organization based on growth stages (Erikson’s developmental models provide some intriguing ideas), with a strong emphasis on biographical details of the men and women who created the conference, supported the missions and were called to service.

    What we need is a system that recognizes that the EMB were often a very loose fellowship of many different groups who were more involved or more influential at different times but always present in shifting alliances -- the missionaries, the Mennonites, the non-Mennonites, the Evangelicals, the Urbanites, the Rural Farmers, those who wanted to Reform existing movements, those who wanted to plant new endeavors.  Furthermore, I am more and more convinced that many of the church bodies joined and remained part of the conference for different reasons -- some wanting fellowship with reform-minded congregations, some wanting to join resources but otherwise be left more or less to their own devices, and those who wanted to join resources to generate a strong missions presence, and those who wanted to maintain a strong ethnic identity.  Even amongst the ethnic Mennonites, you had Kleiners, General Conference, those who leaned towards the MB, the Bruderthaler, the cultural Mennonites, etc. 

Are We an Ethnicity or a Religion?

    Does the term Mennonite refer to a religion or to an ethnicity?  This question regarding religion versus culture assumes greater significance as those who self-identify as Mennonite increasingly move away from their traditional clusters of farms, congregations, and colonies.  People have coined many terms to deal with this question -- Patrick Friesen, the noted poet and teacher of Mennonite descent, refers to himself as a “Recovering Mennonite.”  Many of my fellow Mennonite students at Georgetown University, a well-known Jesuit university of the Catholic faith, referred to themselves not as Mennonites but as having Mennonite grandparents -- in the same manner that Philip Landis, the controversial “Mennonite” cyclist, would later identify himself not as Mennonite but as of Mennonite descent.  In a former Mennonite Brethren church in Minneapolis, Minnesota -- we all celebrated one communion and a single fellowship, but identified ourselves as Bruderthaler-Mennonite, Old Mennonite, General Conference Mennonite, Hutterite, and Mennonite Brethren -- all the same, but all different.  Obviously, we retained distinct cultural differences -- the proverbial alphabet soup of Mennonite identities, that had no affect whatsoever on our shared spiritual understanding.  In an informal conversation, Carolyn Fauth, a Mennonite journalist and historian from Lustre, Montana, shared in conversation that until the 1940s, you could tell the Mennonite groups of Lustre-Volt apart by the pattern of ribbons on the bonnets worn by the women -- the Bruderthaler, the Mennonite Brethren, and the General Conference women all ascribed to a distinct style.  Furthermore, you use the same criteria to distinguish between the Old Mennonite churches, the Amish Mennonites, and the Hutterites.  Yet, I am aware of no written understanding that any of the Mennonites ever believed that God preferred or mandated a specific pattern for bonnets in His Church (though I am aware of stories where certain hairstyles and clothing fasteners are mandated by formal church instruction).  Though originally grounded in a religious understanding, many of these practices would seem to have become cultural norms and traditions rather than religious dogma.