THE JAGUAR AND THE ANTEATER

Pornography, contends anthropologist Arcand (UniversitÇ Laval, QuÇbec), 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.