Eros Eskimo Analysis

The subject of this paper is Eros Eskimos, an unusual and rare art book by Hughes de Jouvancourt published in Montreal during 1968. It appears to be one of many collectable limited edition art books published by Jouvancourt whose other books feature Quebecois artists such as Cornelius Krieghoff, Clarence Gagnon, Maurice Cullen, and Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté. The French language catalogue contains twenty-four erotic Inuit sculptures mainly from Puvirnituq with a few works from the neighbouring communities of Kuujjaurapik, and Inukjuak. The question then, is where to fit Eros Eskimo within the larger discourse of Inuit art history. Eros Eskimo can be understood through psychoanalytic theory as a colonial fetish constructed to cope with the threat posed by racial and sexual difference. This paper will examine the context in which the works were created before analyzing how they function as a colonial fetish before finally explaining how the fetish is maintained through disavowal and difference.
The reason that Eros Eskimo is such an unusual book is that the Inuit did not have a cultural tradition of creating erotic imagery and examples of sexuality throughout Inuit art history are scarce. The majority of Inuit art consisted of images pertaining to religion, hunting, and traditional

European scholars of the nineteenth century believed that fetishes were the highest forms of art within primitive societies that remain, “…frozen in a historyless stasis before the threshold of true religious understanding and self-conscious aesthetic judgment.” This attitude aligns with the opening remarks in Eros Eskimo which talk about the decline of Inuit culture because of the modern man and his religion as well as the false reality of erotic Inuit as being an example of contemporary Inuit