Lay of the Land: Four New Books in Canadian Rural History, The

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2008 by Murton, James

Those who stayed on the land (like Loewen's parents) had to commercialize their farms and "accept new ideas relating to gender, ethnicity, religious faith, and environment" (Loewen 2006, ix). A second group moved into regional towns like Steinbach, Manitoba, where they became middle-class evangelicals with a symbolic ethnicity. Others went further, to cities like Winnipeg and Denver. A fourth group attempted to preserve the old ways by leaving Manitoba to found Old Order Mennonite colonies in Mexico and at Spanish Lookout, British Honduras (now Belize).

Loewen argues that we must see a process of change, not a wholesale transformation (or a simple clinging to old ways) in these responses. The Spanish Lookout Mennonites, for example, saw themselves as preserving the old ways; but they instituted communitarian practices that had been abandoned in the early twentieth centary in Manitoba, while using their English language skills, Canadian background, and productive agriculture to acquire favours from a British colonial government that saw them as a source of economic development.

In other places, the process of adaptation is less clear. Loewen argues that Mennonite farmers ceased to see the land as a gift from God and started to see it as a commodity. He charts the way in which gender ideals for men shifted, from the model man as pacifist, submissive to authority, and achieving his identity as part of the community, to the new Mennonite man who was an "individual achiever, ... ambitious and aggressive," passionate and competitive. Mennonites stopped thinking of themselves as a "separate people" and began thinking of themselves as just another Canadian ethnic group (2006, 64). How did people, though, justify and explain to themselves and others the end of the old values? What arguments did the migrants to Mexico make about retaining the old ways, and what did those who stayed behind say in response? A few clues are offered. Loewen argues that the embrace of evangelicalism provided a path into the modern world, as evangelical churches were part of the mainstream while seeing themselves as separate from, and critical of, the secular world. We are also told that Mennonites had always engaged in a "seemingly contradictory strategy of ... courtpng] modern economic forces in order to sustain an antimodern culture" (Loewen 2006, 188). This would seem to be an important point that might explain how postwar modernity made such inroads into a group that had up to that point sustained an opposition to the mainstream; but little is made of it.

Diaspora in the Countryside is a subtle and satisfying study of cultural and ecological adaptation; yet for all the ways in which Mennonites reacted to postwar modernity, we are left with the sense that they were largely helpless in its grasp. Why it was so powertal, though, is largely left to the reader to infer. Loewen stresses "government policy, market conditions, and technological advancement" (2006, 9) as key components of the Great Disjunctare. What the story told here seems to suggest above all, though, is the tremendous cultural power of high modernism, which offered not just policy and technology but also the sense that these things could ensure general prosperity and security, that age-old human problems were now solved. So powerful was this ideology that it could massively reshape both Mennonites and North American rural culture, both of which had long been deeply suspicious of the wage work, consumption, and urban life that were such key components of this ideology. How was, we might ask, the long struggle against the city finally lost?