‘You have in your hands a fragment from an ongoing piece of urban ethnography, an adventure with pornography.’ Thus Robert Stoller begins the preface to what his tragic and untimely death made the crowning work in his thirty-year-long psychoanalytic study of human sexual behaviour. Stoller works from the premise that his analytic attitude and skills enable him to carry out a psychologically informed anthropology concerned with ‘the origins and dynamics of erotic excitement’. He brought this radical revision of anthropological investigation (which he describes fully, with great wit and charm) to the industry that produces adult heterosexual pornography, he says, out of his ‘belief that, to be successful, [pornographers] must intuitively