The One Day a Hutterite Man Is Allowed to Grow a Beard

A Hutterite man grows a beard on one day and one day only: the day he marries. Not before it, not at baptism, not when he feels like it. So if you stand in a colony yard and look at the men, you already know which of them are married. Nobody told you. It is on their faces and it cannot be taken off. I keep the books on a colony in southern Alberta. In this video I explain what a Hutterite man's face tells a stranger and what it deliberately does not, how I can read which branch of this people a family belongs to from forty metres away, the one thing that is written on a man here and is not written on a woman — and why a married man grows the beard but shaves the upper lip, which is the smallest thing on his face and carries the most. SOURCES · Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia (GAMEO), "Beard" — that the Hutterian Brethren require the beard, and the account of the moustache and Napoleon's soldiers · Conrad Museum Hutterite display, Central Montana — married men bearded, unmarried men clean-shaven, and men's dress · Hutterites.org — the Tiechl by Leut, and the Mitz worn by girls · "Striving for the Divine Ornament: Change and Adaptation of Hutterite Women's Dress in North America" — the stand-up collar of the Lehrerleut against the turned-down collar of the Dariusleut · Joseph and Michael Hofer, Hutterite conscientious objectors who died in 1918 after imprisonment in the United States On the moustache: the encyclopaedia itself says the soldiers "are said to have" worn it and that Anabaptists dropped it "at about that time." There is no document anybody can hand you. I say so in the video and I am saying it here. If you find an error, put it in the comments and I will pin the correction. I would rather be right than look right.