Hutterite Society

Surviving for over five hundred years, the Hutterites have created the world's most successful communal society. In this award-winning book, Yossi Katz and John Lehr offer a thorough analysis of Hutterite society and seek to understand this often misunderstood community.

In this book, Karl A. Peter perceives the Hutterites as an ongoing sociocultural entity constantly adapting to environmental, political, and social circumstances rather than as a static society.

and their strategies for survival.-- "American Historical Review"

The Hutterian Brethren, or Hutterites, live in collective agricultural colonies. Of scores of attempts to establish communal societies, the Hutterites are the only group in North America that has managed to achieve stability and prosperity.

The world's longest-lasting and most successful communal society, the Hutterites have a model of governance that has served them well for almost five hundred years. In the past the colony was an "ark," isolated from both the secular world and the host society. But today colonies face new challenges because of globalization and digital technologies and are losing much of their ability to exclude these influences from their lives. Based on extensive fieldwork with the Schmiedeleut branch of the Hutterites, the book includes the Conference Letters and Regulations, published for the first time in English translation, that provide invaluable insights into strategies for managing change.

Provides 195 original Hutterite recipes, translated into family-size portions, for such foods as buckwheat sausage, dumplings, chili soup, and desserts

The Courts and the Colonies offers a detailed account of a protracted dispute arising within a Hutterite colony in Manitoba, when the Schmiedeleut leaders attempted to force the departure of a group that had been excommunicated but would not leave. This resulted in about a dozen lawsuits in both Canada and the United States between various Hutterite factions and colonies, and placed the issues of shunning, excommunication, legitimacy of leadership, and communal property rights before the secular courts. What is the story behind this extraordinary development in Hutterite history? How did the courts respond, and how did that outside (state) law relate to the traditional inside law of the Hutterites? Utilizing voluminous court records, Esau provides a detailed and fascinating narrative of the prolonged disputes and litigation history of Hutterite colonies at Lakeside, Oak Bluff, Rock Lake, and Huron. He considers whether the legal action was consistent with the historic non-resistance of Hutterites or whether it signaled a fundamental change in norms of Anabaptist perspectives on litigation. He examines the past history of Hutterite litigation, and how the roots of the schism related to controversy over the Schmiedeleut leadership and its alliance with the Bruderhof, a group of Christian communalists, living mainly in the Eastern United States. At stake is the nature of freedom of religion in Canada and the extent to which our pluralistic society is prepared to accommodate the existence of groups that have an illiberal legal system that may not cohere with the outside legal system of the host society. While this book will be of particular interest to scholars of law and religion, it will also appeal to anyone in Anabaptist studies, sociology, anthropology, political theory, and conflict resolution.

One of the longest-lived communal societies in North America, the Hutterites have developed multifaceted communitarian perspectives on everything from conflict resolution and decision-making practices to standards of living and care for the elderly. This compellingly written book offers a glimpse into the complex and varied lives of the nearly 500 North American Hutterite communities. North American Hutterites today number around 50,000 and have common roots with and beliefs akin to the Amish and other Old Order Christians. This historical analysis and anthropological investigation draws on existing research, primary sources, and over 25 years of the authors' interaction with Hutterite communities to recount the group's physical and spiritual journey from its 16th-century founding in Eastern Europe and its near disappearance in Transylvania in the 1760s to its late 19th-century transplantation to North America and into the modern era. It explains how the Hutterites found creative ways to manage social and economic changes over more than five centuries while holding to the principles and cultural values embedded in their faith. Religious scholars, anthropologists, and historians of America and the Anabaptist faiths will find this objective-yet-appreciative account of the Hutterites' distinct North American culture to be a valuable and fascinating study both of the religion and of a viable alternative to modern-day capitalism.