Now too much for us: German and Mennonite transnationalisms, 1874-1944
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is a comparative analysis of two German-speaking Mennonite colonies. One group of 1,800 migrants voluntarily left Russia for Canada in the 1870s and departed Canada for Paraguay’s Gran Chaco in 1927 to preserve their communal autonomy. Another group of 2,000 Mennonites remained in Russia until 1929, when Stalinist persecution forced them to flee as individual refugees through Germany to the Gran Chaco. Here, the colonies negotiated their relationships with each other and crafted different responses to German Nazis and American Mennonites who desired global German or Mennonite unity.\nComparing the groups’ collective narratives—as voluntary migrants and refugees—reveals problems faced by individuals who do not fit into prescribed national or religious molds. This work engages global forces—such as nationalism and displacement—and universal conditions affecting mobile groups—including how they negotiate group identifications and perpetuate local cultures. It begins from the premise that group identifications are not immutable and objective but are tied to fluid, subjective narratives.\nThis framework shapes three arguments: 1) Faith-based diasporas are some of the most tenacious carriers of national cultural features—such as languages and folkways—but they often maintain these features for their own ethnoreligious purposes. 2) Governments and aid agencies benefit from the existence of migrants and refugees by advancing mythologies that are inclusive or exclusive of these populations. 3) Mobile faith-based communities use national and religious concepts to interpret new environments but they formulate their collective narratives differently—on a spectrum from faithful disciples to exiled victims.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".