Contemporary Culture
The jaguar and its name are widely used as a symbol in contemporary culture. It is the national animal of Guyana, and is featured in its coat of arms. The flag of the Department of Amazonas, a Colombian department, features a black jaguar silhouette pouncing towards a hunter. The jaguar also appears in banknotes of Brazilian real. The jaguar is also a common fixture in the mythology of many contemporary native cultures in South America, usually being portrayed as the creature which gave humans the power over fire.
Jaguar is widely used as a product name, most prominently for a luxury car brand. The name has been adopted by sports franchises, including the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars and the Mexican football club Jaguares de Chiapas. Grammy-winning Mexican rock band "Jaguares" were also influenced by the magnificent animal to choose their band name. The crest of Argentina's national federation in rugby union features a jaguar; however, because of a historic accident, the country's national team is nicknamed Los Pumas. The country's "A" (second-level) national team in that sport now bears the Jaguars name.
A melanistic jaguar loose in a South American city is the central figure in the 1942 novel Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich.
In the spirit of the ancient Mayan culture, the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City adopted a red jaguar as the first official Olympic mascot.
Read more about this topic: Jaguar, In Mythology and Culture
Famous quotes containing the words contemporary and/or culture:
“Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)
“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)