The Amish and Their Neighbors
Session 3
Thursday, June 2, 2022 • 7:00 pm
Keynote Address
Tacit Tribes and Soft Allegiances in American Life
Carl Desportes Bowman
The past two decades have witnessed extreme political polarization and paralysis, culture wars between progressives and conservatives, and racial diversity and division. These have been obvious and the focus of both media and scholarly commentary. What is less obvious are the tacit cultural tribes into which Americans sort themselves and their allegiances that often remain unrecognized and unspoken. Bowman's presentation will examine the American cultural context of the early twenty-first century, especially as it pertains to the Amish.
Carl Desportes Bowman is the author of Brethren Society: The Cultural Transformation of a “Peculiar People, ” Portrait of a People: The Church of the Brethren at 300 , and coauthor with Donald Kraybill of On The Backroad to Heaven: Old Order Hutterites, Mennonites, Amish, and Brethren . He has served since the 1990s as director of survey research at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture where he has taken the lead in designing and analyzing national surveys of political and moral culture. In this capacity, he has coauthored with James Davison Hunter a variety of monographs, including The State of Disunion, The Vanishing Center of American Democracy, The Culture of American Families, and The Context of Character: Teen Moral Formation in the 21st Century.