Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life

"Harvey's ideas about religion are some of the most important and ground-breaking of our time. He demonstrates that religion is not about belief but about practices. This book will change the way we understand religion" --Douglas Ezzy, University of Tasmania

"An exhilarating book. Harvey highlights the viscerally relational and conflict-laden force of religion, bringing into the conversation not just human actors but a variety of non-human agents." --Manuel A. Vásquez, University of Florida

"Harvey takes the reader "elsewhere" in this tour de force. Exploring religion's everydayness, he shows how we are embodied, located, and performative in a multi-species world. An intellectual page turner!" --Lois Ann Lorentzen, University of San Francisco

"A smart and slyly challenging book" --Anthropology Review Database

"Harvey takes the reader "elsewhere" in this tour de force. Exploring religion's everydayness, he shows how we are embodied, located, and performative in a multi-species world. An intellectual page turner!" --Lois Ann Lorentzen, University of San Francisco

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.

Graham Harvey is Reader in Religious Studies at the Open University, UK. He is author of Animism: Respecting the Living World and editor of Religions in Focus.