Surely one of the most colorful and fascinating individuals in 20th-century anthropology, Jaime de Angulo (1887–1950) lived many lives. Born in Paris to Spanish parents, in 1905 he immigrated to America, where he worked as a cowboy, earned a medical degree, and ranched in Big Sur, California, before his fateful meetings in 1919 with Berkeley anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Paul Radin. Becoming an amateur linguist and scholar of Native American cultures, he conducted his first fieldwork among the Achumawi people of northern California in 1921. Loosely associated with the University of California at Berkeley, de Angulo maintained an ambivalent and somewhat competitive relationship with Kroeber, but he was generally popular with the Berkeley graduate students. De Angulo seems to have known everyone—from Edward Sapir and Franz Boas in anthropology to Carl Jung and Ezra Pound in psychology and literature. A car accident in 1933 effectively ended his period of active research and writing. In 1949, the year before his death in San Francisco, he presented a series of radio broadcasts on “Old Time Stories,” retellings of Native Californian myths. These broadcasts and the posthumous publication of his Indian Tales (1953) did much to make de Angulo a hero to the Beats of the 1950s and the counterculture of the 1960s.

For too long, however, de Angulo’s literary fame has obscured his professional work in linguistic anthropology. The situation was remedied with the 1983 doctoral dissertation of Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, now a professor of communications at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. In her revised version, Rolling in Ditches with Shamans, Leeds-Hurwitz focuses squarely on de Angulo’s professional life, not his colorful personal life. In the first of two parts, she offers a brief biography, followed by a fuller treatment of the key professional figures in de Angulo’s life (anthropologists A. L. Kroeber, Boas, Paul Radin, Robert Lowie, and Edward W. Gifford and linguists Edward Sapir, Paul-Louis Faye, Hans-Jørgen Uldall, Charles F. Voegelin, and Leonard Bloomfield). The bulk of the book is then devoted to an analysis of de Angulo’s work, with chapters on basic formulations of his underlying questions in psychology, anthropology, and linguistics; the practical problems he encountered in text collection, phonetic transcription, and the classification of languages and vocabularies; his research funded by the Committee on Research in Native American Languages (a chapter the author published in 1985); his ethnographic and linguistic research with the Achumawi of northeast California, his principal Native subject; his work with other Native peoples, mostly in Native California, but including Mexico and the Southwest; and a concluding discussion of de Angulo’s “years of synthesis,” when his attention turned more to theoretical analysis and literary pursuits. The volume includes two useful appendixes: a basic chronology of his life and a complete list of his publications and manuscripts; supplemented by various tables and maps.

Rolling in Ditches with Shamans will be welcomed by everyone with an interest in the history of American anthropology, linguistics, literature, and Native American cultures in the early 20th century. It is the intersection of these diverse subjects that de Angulo’s life and work profoundly address. The subtitle accurately reflects the book’s basic theme: the professionalization of American anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s. Leeds-Hurwitz explores the difficult position of amateur scholars like de Angulo, who were not fully trained and confined within academic institutions. All too often such important scholars have been left out of disciplinary histories. Until the work of Leeds-Hurwitz, de Angulo had been seen as a gifted sort of poet but not a contributor to the discipline in the manner of Kroeber and Sapir. Still, the former stereotypes contained some truth, as de Angulo was a pioneer in what has recently become an anthropological interest in fiction and other alternate modes of professional writing.

This excellent study is detailed and well researched, informative, and well written (and a nice touch is the small coyote silhouette placed beside each page number, in reference to de Angulo’s trickster identity). Leeds-Hurwitz consciously intended her work to complement the 1995 biography by de Angulo’s daughter Gui, which, is now out-of-print and hard to obtain (The Old Coyote of Big Sur: The Life of Jaime de Angulo, Stone Garden Press). There is, therefore, no single, comprehensive account of Jaime de Angulo’s life and work and their interrelationship. Reading this book, one wishes such a synthetic treatment existed. Until then, Rolling in Ditches with Shamans will surely answer many questions about this fascinating and important figure.