Religion is everyday life, not belief
Graham Harvey
Research Summary
This book contains accounts of the author’s research experiences in different parts of the world including New Zealand, Hawai’i, the USA, Israel and Cuba, together with his reflections on a very considerable amount of literature. He builds the thesis that religion should not be viewed as primarily a matter of belief. Rather, it is about what people do in the material world, both in everyday life and in occasional ceremonies or rituals, focused on people’s relationships with the environment and other species.
Researcher
Graham Harvey
Research Institution
The Open University
What is this about?
What is religion? What is religion about? What is the right way to approach or study it? The author draws on his research experiences in various parts of the world, as well as relevant literature, to explain his view that religion is a matter of lived, material experience, focused on human relationships with the world and other species, best studied as a direct encounter.
What was done?
The author has, over years, visited different parts of the world in order to gain direct, first-hand experience of different people’s religious cultures and rituals. The rich descriptive data he has assembled are complemented by detailed academic analysis (in disciplines such as religious studies, anthropology and philosophy).
Main findings and outputs
The discussion is rich and detailed and it is hard to isolate main findings. However:
- Perhaps the book’s key finding is expressed in the title of its final chapter: ‘Religion is etiquette in the real world’.
- This means that religion is a way of dealing with relationships with the environment, with other humans, and with other species: rules about sexuality and diet constitute taboos and borders defining relations and disciplining living.
- Teachers, texts, and institutions should be seen as significant within these boundary-making and relationship-making acts. Static figures or sources do not define religions, fluid actions do. These often include sacrificial actions of giving and receiving, directed at ancestors, deities or the larger-than-human world.
- Religion is not directed towards the ‘transcendent’ but to relations in this world. Distinctions between natural and supernatural tend to have been imported from Christian theology towards ‘indigenous’ religions, falsely, because they do not share them.
- Christianity, if defined as belief in God, is not a religion. (However, like other religions, it never really has been fully defined by belief.)
Relevance to RE
Some, perhaps many, will doubt the book’s conclusions, but the emphasis on lived, relational religion is of clear relevance to RE. Teachers and pupils can benefit from the practice of direct, detailed encounter with religious groups and rituals, whether this is held to be the essential ingredient or one among several. The Commission report underlines the need to address lived religion, for example through visits and meetings with individuals.
Generalisability and potential limitations
The question of generalisability is a good one, as the studies presented tend to be of particularised areas or events and the author is wary of assumptions that insights into one of these can be transferred elsewhere. Another potential issue is that much of his material is drawn from studies of what he calls ‘indigenous’ religion whereas RE still tends to address more numerically dominant movements such as Christianity or Islam. However, the Commission report does suggest benefits in addressing a wider range of religions, including those numerically lower but globally significant and influential.
Find out more
Graham Harvey, Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life, Durham (Acumen) 2013.
General information on the author’s interests and research can be found at http://www.open.ac.uk/people/gh2744