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In his Encyclopedia of American Religions, 6th edition (1999), J. Gordon Melton described four main, currently active Amish groups. In alphabetic order, they are: The Beachy Amish Mennonite Churches split off from the Old Order Amish in Pennsylvania after Bishop Moses Beachy refused to pronounce the ban on some former Old Order members who had left to join a Conservative Mennonite congregation in Maryland. They are the most liberal Amish group: they meet in churches, use automobiles, tractors, and electricity. In 1996, they reported 8,399 adult members in 138 congregations. The Conservative Mennonite Conference was formed in 1910 from a group of more liberal Old Order Amish congregations. They use meeting houses, Sunday schools, and English language services. They are located mainly in the Midwest. No membership data is available. The Evangelical Mennonite Church was organized in 1866 by Bishop Henry Egly in Indiana. They were originally known as the Egly Amish, changed their name to The Defenseless Mennonite Church in 1898, and to their present name in 1948. They stress "regeneration, separation and nonconformity to the world." In 1997, they were reported to have 4,348 adult members in 30 churches. Old Order Amish Mennonite Church congregations are very conservative. Transportation is by horse and buggy. Men are required to grow beards; mustaches are not allowed. Marriage outside the faith is forbidden. They meet in each other's homes for worship every other Sunday. About 8% of their membership is made up of converts from outside the community and their descendents. There were about 30,000 adult members in the U.S. and 900 in Canada in 1995. Including children, the total population was about 139,000.

n his classic work The Gift, Mauss argued that gifts are never "free". Rather, human history is full of examples that gifts give rise to reciprocal exchange. The famous question that drove his inquiry into the anthropology of the gift was: "What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?" (1990:3). The answer is simple: the gift is a "total prestation", imbued with "spiritual mechanisms", engaging the honour of both giver and receiver (the term "total prestation" or "total social fact" (fait social total) was coined by his student Maurice Leenhardt after Durkheim's social fact).

The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is indissolubly tied to the giver: "the objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them" (1990:31). Because of this bond between giver and gift, the act of giving creates a social bond with an obligation to reciprocate on part of the recipient. To not reciprocate means to lose honour and status, but the spiritual implications can be even worse: in Polynesia, failure to reciprocate means to lose mana, one's spiritual source of authority and wealth.

In a gift economy, however, the objects that are given are inalienated from the givers; they are "loaned rather than sold and ceded". It is the fact that the identity of the giver is invariably bound up with the object given that causes the gift to have a power which compels the recipient to reciprocate. Because gifts are inalienable they must be returned; the act of giving creates a gift-debt that has to be repaid