ProQuest Dissertations - The University of Arizona Campus Repository

Mennonite history- in general is characterized by religious zeal, persecution, group
splitting and migration. Referring to their people as "strangers and pilgrims," in following
the biblical phrase in Hebrews 11:13. authors such as Dyck (1995a. b) and Warkentin
(1987) summarize highlights of Mennonite religious ideology pertaining to
"other%vorldliness," persecution, migration and sufTering. This religious ideology and its
corresponding behavior by Mennonite groups occurred in the context of the wider
sociopolitical and economic processes, and the geographical frameworks of their times.
The comple.xities of Mennonite history can be comprehended by combining
traditional anthropological micro-approaches with post-World War II macro-economic
and political discourses. During the post-World War II era. anthropologists and other
social scientists began to work on integrating global and local perspectives on politico-
economic structures, histories and cultures. The early models, modernization theory,
dependency theory, and world-system theory, were academic responses to real world
situations that focused on structural conditions.^ Some of the later models that emerged
from the so-called political economy paradigm - a label for heterogeneous intellectual
and political movements that criticize the homogenization of what actually are multiple
forms of capitalism (Roseberry 1988) - began to integrate structural with historical
approaches. One of the innovations came from Marxist traditions and advocated going
beyond history as a by-product of economic analysis and instead making history a central
inhabitants were welcomed fortheir homecoming (DM R, Vol. 7. No. 13. July 15. 1998. p. 19)
- The origin and history of Mennonile groups is a comple.x set of stories. For the purposes of this
dissertation it can only be partially covered, and only along certain lines. For more details on the histor>' of
Mennonite groups see Bender and Smith (1974), Epp (1974), Klippenstein and Toews (1977). Loewen and
No!t(l996), Sawatzky(1971), Schroederand Huebert(l996), Wedel(1901).