Review of <i>Diaspora in the Countryside: Two MennoniteCommunities and Mid~Twentieth~Century RuralDisjuncture.</i> By Royden Loewen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Royden Loewen's recent book displays all the insights and delicious ironies we have come to expect from him. In this study, Loewen compares the Kleine Gemeinde Mennonites of the Rural Municipality of Hanover, Manitoba, with those of Meade, Kansas, during a time of dramatic change in rural life. Loewen begins with an analysis of what historian John L. Shover termed "the Great Disjuncture" itself, the fragmentation and scattering between the 1930s and 1980s of a once unified rural society, followed by a chapter focusing more specifically on the environment: the image of the snowdrift for Manitoba and the dust bowl for Kansas. The third chapter traces the development of a middle class in both locations. Loewen shifts his focus dramatically for the next two chapters to the radical divergence of religious sensibilities in both places. His analysis of the influence of North American evangelicalism on the Kleine Gemeinde suggests that it provided continuity with their earlier religious understanding and a bridge to being more like their non-Mennonite neighbors. For the most conservative of their number who would seek out the jungles of Belize, the evangelicalism of Canada spurred them to remember an earlier golden age in Manitoba but to reinvent conservative traditions thousands of kilometers away. The next two chapters concentrate on gender in both locations, but use a feminine Kansas and a masculine Manitoba as the venues of analysis. Here Loewen reads his sources carefully to tell us about the changes the rural disjuncture brought to notions of gender. Finally, he turns his attention to the diaspora of the Kleine Gemeinde more specifically. One chapter seeks out the Kleine Gemeinde of Spanish Lookout, Belize, while the other observes the Kleine Gemeinde Mennonites who ended up in the cities of Winnipeg and Denver.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".