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Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life
Religion is more than a matter of worshipping a deity or spirit. For many people, religion pervades every part of their lives and is not separated off into some purely private and personal realm. Religion is integral to many people's relationship with the wider world, an aspect of their dwelling among other beings - both human and other-than-human - and something manifested in the everyday world of eating food, having sex and fearing strangers. "Food, Sex and Strangers" offers alternative ways of thinking about what religion involves and how we might better understand it. Drawing on studies of contemporary religions, especially among indigenous peoples, the book argues that religion serves to maintain and enhance human relationships in and with the larger-than-human world. Fundamentally, religion can be better understood through the ways we negotiate our lives than in affirmations of belief - and it is best seen when people engage in intimate acts with themselves and others.
- GenresNonfiction
258 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 31, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 28, 2017
After you read the title of this book, I don't think you need to read it.
What I found disappointing about Graham Harvey's Food, Sex, and Strangers was how his writing strangled the life out of an excellent idea. His prose manslaughtered the idea that we should see religion as what we do everyday, rather than what we preach about the 'divine,' or 'believe' based on sacred texts.
What made Harvey's academic manslaughter so flagrant, frustrating, and worrying, was that; at times; Harvey can write with a certain wit and sparkle; even about the subject of academic manslaughter:
"We are not and cannot be dislocate minds, neither can we be dislocated persons. Alienation results from a wrong headed effort to ignore our bodies and our world." (83)
"Academia in the mould of elite European Christianity and Cartesianism has created phantasms and studied them. Just like psychotic, depressed and unutterably sad laboratory animals, torn from kin and kind, individualized, and unreal, the objects of atomizing studies are unlike beings in the real world." (94)
Moments of clear and confident writing like this are sadly few and far between. Most of Food, Sex, and Strangers keeps Graham Harvey confined to a straitjacket which requires he debate and redefine other academics definitions of definitions.
Not coincidentally, I found the best parts of this work are the few places where Harvey allows his ideas to speak for a few paragraphs in a row without citing another academic. But this is always an exception to the rule. As Harvey's citations pile on, he loses his focus, debating the value of debates of debates, ostensibly to refocus our attention on what people do rather than say. Oi.
This tension between what Harvey says he would like to do and what he does reflects the fact this book is as much an argument about how other academics should study religion, as it is a book about what religion is.
Still, I have been too harsh on Harvey.
I do not doubt his intentions, and in person, I suspect I would like him. He clearly desires that academics take religious studies out of the ivory tower and into the real world, which he likes to term, 'elsewhere.' Harvey's idea; that religion is what we do everyday is excellent; and something I think deserves more attention; but not by reading books likes these. I doubt that we can approach the real world when we are strangled with footnotes and scholarly pettifogging. But, as Harvey would agree, I bet we could over dinner.
What I found disappointing about Graham Harvey's Food, Sex, and Strangers was how his writing strangled the life out of an excellent idea. His prose manslaughtered the idea that we should see religion as what we do everyday, rather than what we preach about the 'divine,' or 'believe' based on sacred texts.
What made Harvey's academic manslaughter so flagrant, frustrating, and worrying, was that; at times; Harvey can write with a certain wit and sparkle; even about the subject of academic manslaughter:
"We are not and cannot be dislocate minds, neither can we be dislocated persons. Alienation results from a wrong headed effort to ignore our bodies and our world." (83)
"Academia in the mould of elite European Christianity and Cartesianism has created phantasms and studied them. Just like psychotic, depressed and unutterably sad laboratory animals, torn from kin and kind, individualized, and unreal, the objects of atomizing studies are unlike beings in the real world." (94)
Moments of clear and confident writing like this are sadly few and far between. Most of Food, Sex, and Strangers keeps Graham Harvey confined to a straitjacket which requires he debate and redefine other academics definitions of definitions.
Not coincidentally, I found the best parts of this work are the few places where Harvey allows his ideas to speak for a few paragraphs in a row without citing another academic. But this is always an exception to the rule. As Harvey's citations pile on, he loses his focus, debating the value of debates of debates, ostensibly to refocus our attention on what people do rather than say. Oi.
This tension between what Harvey says he would like to do and what he does reflects the fact this book is as much an argument about how other academics should study religion, as it is a book about what religion is.
Still, I have been too harsh on Harvey.
I do not doubt his intentions, and in person, I suspect I would like him. He clearly desires that academics take religious studies out of the ivory tower and into the real world, which he likes to term, 'elsewhere.' Harvey's idea; that religion is what we do everyday is excellent; and something I think deserves more attention; but not by reading books likes these. I doubt that we can approach the real world when we are strangled with footnotes and scholarly pettifogging. But, as Harvey would agree, I bet we could over dinner.
April 2, 2021
Harvey argues that religion is about relationships between people, including nonhuman people. This is a really useful addition to a tradition of books moving 'religious studies' beyond the consideration of things which follow the pattern of Christianity.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews