Jaguar and the Anteater: Pornography Degree Zero

From Publishers Weekly
This elegantly written, dispassionate study broadens the debate on pornography through its anthropological, historical and cross-cultural perspectives. Surveying research worldwide, Arcand, a French-Canadian anthropologist, reports that no conclusive links exist between viewing pornography and criminal sexual behavior. Nevertheless, he finds that much pornography promotes an infantile, dehumanizing model of sexuality. Arcand surveys South American native myths portraying a contest between the jaguar (symbol of sex and reproduction as an escape from death) and the anteater, an asocial creature without much appetite. The Sherente tribe of Brazil embrace the jaguar, but modern pornography, declares Arcand, sides with the anteater in promoting cozy isolation and escape from traditional social constraints. One section contrasts medieval India's open embrace of human sexuality, as exemplified by erotic temple sculptures, with modern Western prudery. Arcand also distills much information on pornography's embattled history, marketing and consumption. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
An anthropological overview of the many political, moral, and social debates concerning pornography. The upshot seems to be that although there is much disagreement over what does and does not constitute pornography, as well as over its positive or negative effects, humans have an overwhelming interest in actual pornography, and nearly as strong an interest in it as a subject of discourse. Especially instructive are Arcand's accounts of the many political wrangles over pornography, from the debate in feminist circles to the many commissions created to study and report on it. The sidelights are often illuminating, too. Members of the Meese Commission, who had to see many porno films before writing their 1985 report on pornography, found themselves jostling one another in their eagerness to "get a better view." Brian McCombie

From Kirkus Reviews
Pornography, contends anthropologist Arcand (Universit‚ Laval, Qu‚bec), 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. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French


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An anthropological overview of the many political, moral, and social debates concerning pornography. The upshot seems to be that although there is much disagreement over what does and does not constitute pornography, as well as over its positive or negative effects, humans have an overwhelming interest in actual pornography, and nearly as strong an interest in it as a subject of discourse. Especially instructive are Arcand's accounts of the many political wrangles over pornography, from the debate in feminist circles to the many commissions created to study and report on it. The sidelights are often illuminating, too. Members of the Meese Commission, who had to see many porno films before writing their 1985 report on pornography, found themselves jostling one another in their eagerness to "get a better view."


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