Toward a religious integrity: how to explain Graham Harvey's hermeneutic failure? Review of sex, food and strangers. Religion as everyday life (Moscow, NLO, 2020)

In the article offered to the reader’s attention, a review of the monograph by the British anthropologist G. Harvey, recently published in Russian translation, Sex, Food and Strangers. Religion as Everyday Life (Moscow: NLO, 2020), the author enters into polemics with the ideologists of the “materialist” approach to the study of religion. The inconsistency of Harvey’s theory is revealed - an attempt to build a new, essentially metaphysical, methodology of religious studies based on an unambiguous rejection of symbolic-anthropological concepts, on the one hand, and the achievements of traditional metaphysics, on the other. Separately, Harvey’s free treatment of theological sources is discussed, which led him to draw a number of bold generalizations and erroneous conclusions about the essence of the Christian, Muslim and Jewish experience of theology. As an alternative to the internally contradictory concept of Harvey, the author offers his own phenomenological approach to the description of religious traditions, designed to contribute to a holistic understanding of the historical and Abrahamic myth.