scholarly journals How Do I Count Thee? Various Angles for Examining the Doubling Times of the Amish

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 104-125
Author(s):  
Joseph F. Donnermeyer

The focus of this article is the measurement of how rapidly various parts of Amish society grow, including the number of settlements, households, church districts, and ordained men. "Amish society" means those Plain Anabaptist communities that both identify themselves as Amish and forbid car ownership. Doubling time was selected as the statistic to examine this growth. It is a measure of how quickly a population doubles; that is, its exponential growth. Most of the doubling times calculated for this article were within a few years of the doubling time estimate of 20 years for the Amish population in general, based on statistics from the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. The article concludes with a discussion of what these measures of growth mean for the future of Amish society and extrapolations, based on current doubling times, by decade from 2020 to 2050. Recommended is a greater focus among Plain Anabaptist scholars on the population dynamics of the Amish, arguing that demographic dimensions underlie possible changes in the social, cultural, religious, and economic features of the Amish through the remainder of the twenty-first century.

Author(s):  
Christopher A. Cooper ◽  
H. Gibbs Knotts

The concluding chapter ties together key findings from previous chapters, highlights the book’s theoretical contributions, building on the social identity literature reviewed in chapter 1. The concluding chapter reinforces the idea that southern identity remains, but that the shape of twenty-first century southern identity is different from twentieth-century identity. The concluding chapter closes with a discussion of the future of southern identity and a prediction that regionalism and regional distinctiveness will only become more pronounced in an increasingly interconnected world.


Inner Asia ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-171
Author(s):  
Hildegard Diemberger

AbstractIn this paper I follow the social life of the Tibetan books belonging to the Younghusband-Waddell collection. I show how books as literary artefacts can transform from ritual objects into loot, into commodities and into academic treasures and how books can have agency over people, creating networks and shaping identities. Exploring connections between books and people, I look at colonial collecting, Orientalist scholarship and imperial visions from an unusual perspective in which the social life and cultural biography of people and things intertwine and mutually define each other. By following the trajectory of these literary artefacts, I show how their traces left in letters, minutes and acquisition documents give insight into the functioning of academic institutions and their relationship to imperial governing structures and individual aspirations. In particular, I outline the lives of a group of scholars who were involved with this collection in different capacities and whose deeds are unevenly known. This adds a new perspective to the study of this period, which has so far been largely focused on the deeds of key individuals and the political and military setting in which they operated. Finally, I show how the books of this collection have continued to exercise their attraction and moral pressure on twenty-first-century scholars, both Tibetan and international, linking them through digital technology and cyberspace.


Legal Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Rebecca Probert ◽  
Stephanie Pywell

Abstract During 2020, weddings were profoundly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. During periods of lockdown few weddings could take place, and even afterwards restrictions on how they could be celebrated remained. To investigate the impact of such restrictions, we carried out a survey of those whose plans to marry in England and Wales had been affected by Covid-19. The 1,449 responses we received illustrated that the ease and speed with which couples had been able to marry, and sometimes whether they had been able to marry at all, had depended not merely on the national restrictions in place but on their chosen route into marriage. This highlights the complexity and antiquity of marriage law and reinforces the need for reform. The restrictions on weddings taking place also revealed the extent to which couples valued getting married as opposed to having a wedding. Understanding both the social and the legal dimension of weddings is important in informing recommendations as to how the law should be changed in the future, not merely to deal with similar crises but also to ensure that the general law is fit for purpose in the twenty-first century.


2006 ◽  

A hundred years after its philanthropist founder identified the social evils of his time, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation initiated a major consultation among leading thinkers, activists and commentators, as well as the wider public. This book examines the underlying problems that pose the greatest threat to British society in the twenty-first century.


2005 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 134-136
Author(s):  
Gerd-Rainer Horn

For some time now, sociologists, economists and assorted futurologists have flooded the pages of learned journals and the shelves of libraries with analyses of the continuing decline of industrial and other forms of labor. In proportion to the decline of working time, those social scientists proclaim, the forward march of leisure has become an irresistible trend of the most recent past, the present and, most definitely, the future. Those of us living on planet earth have on occasion wondered about the veracity of such claims which, quite often, appear to stand in flat contradiction to our experiences in everyday life. The work of the Italian sociologist Pietro Basso is thus long overdue and proves to be a welcome refutation of this genre of, to paraphrase Basso, obfuscating hallucinations.


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