Kienzler, H: Gender and Communal Longevity among Hutterites

"Gender and Communal Longevity among Hutterites: How Hutterite Women Establish, Maintain, and Change Colony Life" (Hanna Kienzler 2005) is the first comprehensive work on Hutterite women for over tow decades.In the first chapter "Communal Longevity: the Hutterite Case", ethnographic studies on Hutterite society are reviewed in order to convey an overview of the ethnographic writs released during the past thirty years. Thereby the focus is on factors that have been found to be related to the group's long-term survival. In order to not only describe and analyse an arbitrary accumulation of such factors, Kienzler applies Christoph Brumann's concept of assessing and analysing communal longevity onto the Hutterite case. In his book "Die Kunst des Teilens: Eine vergleichende Untersuchung zu den Uberlebensbedingungen kommunitärer Gruppen" (1998) he points out that the circumstances leading to communal long-term survival largely depend on the impact of different cultural domains. Since Brumann and most of the other ethnographers who are concerned with Hutterite society and culture mainly focus on institutions so äs to provide answers to their respective research questions, the reader primarily learns about census data, formal institutions, social Organisation, and norms, rules, and regulations. Little information is, however, provided with regards to how individual Hutterite women and men actively participate in colony life and thereby ensure communal survival. By way of focusing and providing information on how Hutterite women influence everyday colony life, Kienzler is determined to complement and Supplement Brumann's analysis of communal durability.However, in order to adequately describe and analyse her data on how Hutterite women actively participate in colony life and thus ensure communal survival, Kienzler first develops a theoretical framework of actor and agency oriented feminist theories. In the second chapter "Gendered Places", Kienzler therefore leaves