Within the Old Colony Mennonite settlements of Belize, the relationship between religious and economic practices entails a constant navigation of the acceptable, where threats of worldliness come from technology and from contact with outsiders. This paper takes as its focus the business of a butcher in Shipyard settlement, whose daily work testifies to a navigation of both of these potential threats. This entrepreneur uses technologies of energy, transportation, and communication-operated in part by an outside worker-to extend the radius of his meat business. The tense environment of Shipyard's religious diversity frames our discussion of these observations, leading us to reconsider our understanding of the Ordnung and its relation to business activity. To understand the entrepreneur's skillful navigation of rules and opportunities, we use the term "social capital" (Bourdieu 1986;Portes 2010) to reflect on the paradoxical relationship between religious rules and entrepreneurial space-and to consider how the Ordnung can be seen as a spacious (rather than a constrictive) place for Mennonite entrepreneurs.
We examine the migration history of the Old Order Hoover Mennonites located in the small, multiethnic country of Belize. The Hoover Mennonites live in the settlements of Upper Barton Creek, Springfield, Birdwalk, and Roseville. Characterized as one of Belize's more conservative churches, the Hoover Church is also Belize's most geographically dispersed Mennonite community. This paper brings together historical and present-day sources to account for and chart this dispersion. To describe what brought together this group between 1958 and 1984 and what drove their subsequent migration across Belize, we examine the religious and legal circumstances of the founding of their settlements. Observations and reflections on their most recent expansion consider how changes in immigration policy, desire for separation from worldly influences, and population growth contributed to an Old Order community that is doubly separated: from the world and from kindred settlements.
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