Holding the line

by Diane Zimmerman Umble

In Holding the Line, Diane Zimmerman Umble offers a historical and ethnographic study of how the Old Order Mennonites and Amish responded to and accommodated the telephone from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. For Old Order communities, Umble writes, appropriate use of the telephone marks the edges of appropriate association - who can be connected to whom, in what context, and under what circumstances. Umble's analysis of the social meaning of the telephone explores how technology affects community identity and the maintenance of cultural values through the regulation of the means of communication.