Modern Primate

Two of my favorite shows on TV right now are TLC’s My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding and National Geographic’s American Colony: Meet the Hutterites. For the longest time I didn’t really like a lot of reality TV shows, and I think it’s because so many of them focused on rednecks – a culture I never really had a lot of exposure to growing up in South Dakota. We had our own kinds of hicks and I’m sure many would insist that they’re rednecks, but we also had plenty of these two groups who, until lately, were under-represented on the national stage: Hutterites and Travelers.

On first site, the two groups couldn’t be more different. The puritanical Hutterites stand out wherever they go, looking like Amish Lite. And typically you wouldn’t be able to differentiate a traveler, or American Gypsy, from many other people who pass through town briefly. But the two groups have a few more things in common than meets the eye.