Hutterite religion and community

For over ten years I have conducted ethnographic field research to understand Hutterites on their own terms and to get a glimpse of their socioreligious world. The quotidian instances and lived experiences that I observed in colonies spanning three Canadian provinces and five U.S. states revealed that Hutterites are much more divided and diversified than previous scholarship has depicted. I have found nuance, complexity, and diversity in Hutterite identity formations. Through my research on Hutterites, I have found a microcosm of the various issues that work to form identities and divisions in the US and Canada. Hutterites are rural blue-collar conservative Christians, and understanding their values and identities is essential to understanding and unpacking these divisions. In my dissertation, I accomplish this by examining ways that Hutterites in colonies across the US and Canada “dress” and are “dressed” by their social, emotional, and material world. I use the term “dress” as a synecdoche for all the embodied, emotional, and material practices in which Hutterites engage and engender in their daily lives. Dress, broadly conceived, is how I examine the values and practices that matter to Hutterites and inform their identities. Dress is a material manifestation of beliefs, praxis, embodiment, and agency, not just “material” but a way to understand Hutterites. Therefore, the upshot of this in-depth ethnography that pays special attention to the ways Hutterites understand themselves and their world will be an understanding of the emotional associations and material practices that matter to Hutterites and an understanding of socioreligious processes that construct and maintain divisions.