Overview

Over the last two decades, pornography has become not only one of the most spectacularly profitable industries in the West but also, in its own way, the most innovative, with the development of more and more individualized technologies of sexual stimulation and simulation. At the same time, it has been the focus of ever fiercer debates: political, ethical and judicial. Despite the media's expanding sexual obsessions, pornography remains largely a matter of public shame, while being privately consumed by millions of citizens, now female as well as male. It is a unique phenomenon of our time, and one whose real significance is still little understood. In this remarkable study Bernard Arcand approaches pornography as an anthropologist, in an attempt to explain precisely why it exists in these forms at the moment, and with what consequences. To do so, he has assembled data on the state of the industry and its technology, on its history, and on the polemics it has engendered, especially, but not exclusively, among feminists. The result is probably the most comprehensive overview of the subject ever published. But Arcand's main concern in The Jaguar and the Anteater is to elucidate the ways in which pornography is a mirror of our modernity-how we get the porn we deserve and need. Drawing on the work of social theorists such as Lasch, Sennet, Baudrillard and Lipovetsky, he examines the consumption of pornography and its wider significance in terms of privatization, specialization, isolation and extremism. And, while stressing the peculiar originality of contemporary porn, he uses anthropological material, particularly from South American tribal societies, to suggest that the phenomenon is also a new and uncertain response to a series of elementary questions concerning modesty and desire, masturbation and inhibition, death and illusions of eternal youth.

Full Product Details

9780860914464

Table of Contents

Reviews

Even if the meaning of the mysterious title is only revealed at the end, after some carefully maintained intellectual suspense, that of the subtitle is quickly understood. Via the theme of pornography, it is modernity itself, with all its inadequacies and contradictions, which is explored throughout this ambitious and brilliant book. For pornography (whether looked at in terms of production or consumption) exemplifies the logic of excess which characterizes out times. - Marc Auge, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris This informed and intelligent study of pornography as a product and expression of modernity is one of the few to approach the subject with wit, good nature and apparent disinterest. - Harriet Gilbert, editor of The Sexual Imagination

Pornography, contends anthropologist Arcand (Universite Laval, Quebec), marks a choice in favor of a minimalist, uncommitted life purged as far as possible of appetites: the survivalist lifestyle of the anteater rather than that of the fast-living, pleasure-seeking jaguar. It's a choice scorned throughout history, but one that our contemporary culture of narcissism has made especially compelling. The road to this conclusion is winding and bumpy. After acknowledging the difficulty of defining pornography, Arcand offers three definitions - clinical, empirical, and moral - that seem to have few points of contact. His ensuing review of the continuing debates on the subject among censors, libertarians, feminists, and government commissions is more notable for suave ridicule - the disputants, not surprisingly, come across as so many fish in a barrel - than for indicating any positive alternatives. And his abbreviated historical account of modernity in the context of Western history since 1500, however breathless, seems overlong for the central insight it yields: that the capitalist drive to specialization makes pornography eminently logical as one more form of consumer knowledge and experience. These ground-clearing pages, which comprise four-fifths of the book, are best approached as a treasure trove of discourses - informed by a pleasurably wide range of references (Martin Luther, Louis XVI, Edward Albee, John Berger) - on the reliance of pornography on the printing press; on the transition from heresy to libertinism; on Hugh Hefner on the quintessential modern man. Only in his closing section - the only truly anthropological one here - do the terms of Arcand's argument ( Modesty runs much deeper than sex.... The true 'atom' of kinship must be to prohibit masturbation ) become genuinely provocative. Not a major contribution to the debate, then, but a fine introduction, ultimately original and engagingly written throughout. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Bernard Arcand teaches anthropology at L'Universite Laval in Quebec. He is the author of L'image de l'Amerindien dans les manuels scolaires du Quebec. Wayne Grady the translator, has edited several anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Short Stories, From the Country: Writings About Rural Canada and, with Matt Cohen, Intimate Strangers: New Stories from Quebec. His translations include Antoine Maillet's On the Eighth Day, for which he won the Governor General's Award, and Daniel Poliquin's Visions of Jude. He is currently writing a book on coyotes.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available