Kinship, Elevated: Genetic Religiosities and the Impossibility of Exit

Kinship, ElevatedGenetic Religiosities and the Impossibility of Exit Lars Stoltzfus (bio) In a recent study of 1,824 Old Order Amish couples living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania—a hub for various Plain Anabaptist groups like the Old Order Amish or Team Mennonites1—a group of medical geneticists calculated the extent to which this ethnoreligious community is interrelated.2 Plain Anabaptist communities are closed, with members rarely leaving their religion, culture, and family of origin. This, combined with a very low number of converts, has led to a high degree of intergenerational genetic closeness complete with rare genetic conditions, genes malfunctioning and morphing. In discussing their findings, the researchers who conducted the study soften the blow by stating, "founder effects,3 which occur following the isolation of a subpopulation, reduce genetic variation. … In founder populations, marriages between individuals with increased relatedness (elevated kinship) are common."4 However, the terminology of "elevated kinship" is at once a bemusing and disturbing way of describing its mainstream connotation: "inbred." End Page 165 I am interested in exploring this, the ethnicity aspect of ethnoreligiosity and how it impacts not only the process of existing within and exiting one's religious community, but also how it weaves together gender and genetics. As someone whose kith and kin are Lancaster Old Order Amish, Beachy Amish, and Conservative Mennonite, I am familiar with how family, kinship, ethnoreligiosity, and genetics get discussed and dissected by any variety of English.5 Using my own genetically odd body as the site of conflicted exit from my religious heritage and its inextricable construction of gender, I follow Hil Malatino's lament: "when I write of the sense of ontological homelessness I and many other intersex, trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming folks experience, it is intimately interwoven with the sense that one's being is epistemologically impossible to make sense of given the linguistic constraints we are forced to submit to in order to become intelligible subjects."6 In this way, exiting ethnoreligious constructions of gender necessitates making sense of how one's familial, religious, and sociocultural background is not only performed externally, but written into the very genetic codes of the body. As Marilyn Strathern notes, "what could be more concrete than heredity evident in every body cell?"7 The through-line in disentangling the relationships among ethnoreligiosity, its cisheteronormative expectations, and exit is following "the way persons are connected to one another, not through what they share in a general way, as we might speak of all humankind as kin, but through what has been transmitted in particular ways":8 kinship, family, and ethnicity-as-religious-reproduction. Ethnoreligiosity for Amish people is not a vague idea of relatedness, it is a web of interconnected bloodlines so strong that it is a dedicated hobby and topic of discussion. Freundschaft: figuring out how many ways you are related to the person with whom you are talking. The verbal repetition of relatedness stresses the value of ethnoreligious reproduction in all forms. It establishes what is familial, what is normative, and what is intelligible. In this realm, the familial can be an essentializing, ontologically limiting force reproducing iterations of itself through time utilizing religious tradition, a reliance on the familiar, and kinship (elevated or not). Persons are connected via shared genetic history, and this connection is transmitted through not only genetic reproduction, but the particularized way cisheteronormative reproduction is defined in tandem with religion. Amish gender and gendered ethnoreligiosity are reproduced externally as well as internally: while gender, sex assigned at birth, and one's primary and End Page 166 secondary sexual characteristics are combined into one singular identity, so, too, are the aesthetics and expectations demanded of one's predetermined identity. Gender is identifiable and replicable through mundane passed-down actions such as a woman teaching her daughter to sew a cape dress, and this daughter in turn teaching her own daughter.9 This nongenetic religiosity transmitted through generational reproduction of norms signifies not only how gender looks, but how it is literally made and repeated through time. The intergenerational act of inheritance balances ethnicity with religiosity, nature with nurture, and assigned gender with assigned future. Ethnoreligious identity is consequently complex, yet...