Amish Society

John A. Hostetler was a sociologist who was himself raised in an Amish family before leaving the community, and this Johns Hopkins University Press book, now in its fourth edition, is his standard scholarly sociological study of the Amish, including the practice of church discipline and the shunning practice called Meidung. Its strength is a rare combination, genuine insider knowledge of Amish life from his own upbringing paired with rigorous outside academic training, which is why the book remains the principal academic reference on the subject decades after its first edition. Its limit is that Amish communities themselves are not uniform, practice varies meaningfully between different Amish affiliations and settlements, so a claim about one specific community's practice of Meidung should be checked against the diversity Hostetler himself documents rather than treated as a single universal Amish rule.