308 BOOK REVIEWS

including the semi-mock religion of the Temple of Satan and the tongue-in-cheek
erection of the statue of Baphomet in 2015, a fun way to summarise these qualities
found within modern Satanism.

TARA BLUE MOON SMITH

University of Sydney

GRAHAM HARVEY: Food, Sex & Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life.
Durham: Acumen, 2013; pp. 224.

In Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life Graham Harvey
argues that our understanding of religions has been skewed by Protestant Christian con-
cepts. Foremost among these is the notion that religion is defined by “belief in God,”
or “belief ” in anything for that matter. Harvey contends that these concepts reflect the
characteristics of one religion—Christianity—especially its Protestant, elite, and mod-
ernist incarnation. In order to do justice to religion we must begin our studies from
“elsewhere,” to start again without these historical and cultural biases. He contends that
religion should be studied as part of the ordinary lives of practitioners: based on perfor-
mance, practice, lifestyle, and relationships, especially taboos based around food and
sex that often serve to define and demarcate communities. This is a plausible argument;
however, the book also contains many other less convincing conclusions.
Food, Sex and Strangers is well written and clear, exhibiting an engaging sense of
humour, and with one eye on pedagogical needs; in many ways it would make a good
text for undergraduate theory and method courses. For example, Harvey expresses
important theoretical considerations in a lively and digestible manner, using a plethora
of case studies: Ojibwa, Maori, Hawaiian, Yoruba, Jewish, (Neo-)Pagan and
“popular” Christianity. He introduces novel means of engaging students on the issues
of defining religion: how would you show “religion” to visiting space aliens? As even
human beings cannot see “belief ” or “transcendence,” they may need to see, smell,
touch, and taste religion. Before commencing on such an engagement with
“elsewhere,” Harvey also helpfully provides some mental exercises that may be of use
in the classroom.
He boldly and cannily states that if “belief ” was the definitional core of “religion,”
Christianity would be the only religion or alternatively, as he characterises belief as
exclusive to Christianity, there are serious grounds for denying Christianity the status
of “religion.” Harvey uses this contention to argue that elements specific to one tradi-
tion, such as belief in God or goat sacrifice, should not be used to define all religions,
rather than argue the latter. Indeed, his analysis of everyday Christian practice later in
the book helps to tie these threads together and make clear his underlying argument.
Despite his criticism of the universality of the concept of “belief,” Harvey makes
no concerted effort to engage with similar arguments concerning the concept of
“religion” or with more nuanced defences of “belief.” Both concepts are undeniably
of Western origin and therefore effected by a long Christian history. Harvey not only
arbitrarily draws the line at “religion” to the exclusion of “belief,” but also fails to
adequately defend this choice, except to explain away scholarly critiques of the

© 2018 The Authors Journal of Religious History published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf
of Religious History Society
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 BOOK REVIEWS 309
concept of religion as a reaction to the concept of belief. Harvey’s critique relies on
an outdated caricature of “belief,” as not only radically interior, personal, and intellec-
tual, but also separate from the everyday and materiality. Furthermore, the fact that
many traditions are deeply orthopraxic is automatically assumed to entail a lack of
belief. This critique derives from William James and Rudolf Otto rather than from
contemporary social scientists, and all contemporary usages of terms such as “postu-
lation” are dismissed as obsession with “silly” or “irrational” beliefs (which makes
about as much sense as referring to ritual centred scholarship as based on “weird” or
“exotic” rituals).
The most disappointing aspect of this book is that all of this rich material, engag-
ingly presented, appears ultimately to advocate a kind of behaviourism. Whether
religions centre on ritual or not surely does not entail a lack of interest in the sense of
reality of the frameworks and networks within which humans act? Harvey seems to
simply invert the dualism between mind and body, which he critiques, by excluding
the mind and its processes from an “embodied” account of religion.
He appears to be using this important methodological debate to assert his own nor-
mative agenda. Large parts of this book read like a deep ecological tract. The differ-
ences between traditions are downplayed to assert that religion is about stressing a
multi-species community and the universality of consciousness. The fact that relating to
a multi-species community is not necessarily definitive of many traditions does not
seem to trouble Harvey (despite mounting a parallel argument about the place of belief
in religious traditions). The book casts a Manichean view of the difference between all
religious people and Modernists; a demarcation that seems to increasingly evaporate
under (his own) scrutiny, as the later chapter on Christianity demonstrates. Harvey
attempts to justify this normative intrusion by arguing that because of the belief-centric
approach scholars are afraid to approach religion and to engage in it. He equates the
study of religion with other areas, most risibly with catering. If religious studies courses
must be equated with cookery courses, they are best viewed as courses with a range of
ingredients and recipes, for a mixed group of omnivores, vegans, and other adherents
of special diets. This is why Religious Studies has its own system of taboos that distin-
guishes it from theology and allows scholars of religion to make a distinct contribution.
This also forces scholars to recognise their limitations and the appropriate limits of their
activities—Harvey misconstrues this scholarly probity as an attempt to be like the
Christian Deity, omnipresent and all-knowing, a misreading that mars an otherwise use-
ful work of Religious Studies theory.

LIAM SUTHERLAND
University of Edinburgh

WILFRIED HARTMANN and KENNETH PENNINGTON, eds.: The History of Courts and Pro-
cedure in Medieval Canon Law. Washington: Catholic University of America
Press, 2016; pp. xiv + 506.

This long-awaited volume on the procedure and practice of medieval courts is the lat-
est instalment in the “History of Medieval Canon Law” series, co-edited by prominent

© 2018 Religious History Association