Rolling in Ditches with Shamans: Jaime de Angulo and the Professionalization of American Anthropology (review)

The subtitle of Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz's biography of Jaime de Angulo (1887–1950) might lead one to think that he was a major player in the professionalization of anthropology, when he actually ended up as one of its casualties. Initially trained in medicine, de Angulo entered anthropological linguistics when the shift from self-taught status to academic training was taking place in the early twentieth century. Linguistics was then still a stepchild of ethnology, and only a handful of universities could offer advanced courses. By 1924, however, the Linguistic Society of America had been founded, with its journal Language appearing the next year. Furthermore, the breakthrough concept of the phoneme in conjunction with Edward Sapir's indifference to ethnology may have accelerated the move towards a separate disciplinary identity. Interestingly enough, though, according to Leeds-Hurwitz it was Franz Boas rather than Sapir who first began to argue for autonomous institutional status.

Thus, by the time de Angulo began to study American Indian languages, amateurs were only tolerated if their work was of professional quality and if a particular ethnographic area could not be covered by an academically trained linguist. Nevertheless, as Leeds-Hurwitz points out, de Angulo was not only a member of the "invisible college" of Boasian anthropology, albeit a marginal one, but he also met the then-implicitly-agreed-upon criteria for a professional in anthropology: contributions to journals and conferences based on fieldwork data analysis. Fascinated by speculations about the genesis of the human mind, de Angulo had set himself ambitious research goals dealing with psychology and formal logic from the language angle. An indefatigable fieldworker, he analyzed a total of thirty native Californian, Southwestern, and Mexican languages, and Sapir as well as Boas, both of whom extended him a large number of research grants, regarded his descriptive work as being among the best produced at the time. Notwithstanding de Angulo's idiosyncratic approach to phonetic symbols, which frustrated Boas, he was far ahead of his time in other areas, such as the organization of lexis into semantic fields instead of alphabetical word lists. Since Boasian linguistics required the collection of oral texts on which grammatical analysis was to be based, de Angulo also became interested in the classifications of myths, and his suggested genres resemble very much those of later folklorists. In addition, he clearly understood the Indian concept of creation as an ongoing process of the remaking of the world, and he recognized the essence of oral tradition in its performance and repetition of narrative details. Unfortunately, Leeds-Hurwitz neglects to connect these insights to the development of Dell Hymes's ethnography of speaking or to the emphasis on performance in folklore studies in the 1960s. Also noteworthy is de Angulo's finding of folk taxonomies for automobile engine parts based on anatomical comparisons among the Pit River Indians. A similar process of linguistic acculturation among the Cibecue Apache of Arizona was reported thirty years later by Keith Basso. Leeds-Hurwitz offers no speculation regarding de Angulo's possible influence on this prominent ethnographer or on Basso's perhaps deliberate ignoring or ignorance of de Angulo's prior discovery. However, the most glaring omission of Leeds-Hurwitz's assessment of de Angulo's possible influence on later generations of anthropologists has to do with de Angulo's proposal that ethnographers should write like artists. It would seem that de Angulo in this case was clearly a precursor of Clifford Geertz, who a few decades later encouraged ethnographers to regard themselves as writers of literature.

Regarding fieldwork practices, de Angulo was convinced that "going native" was the best way to discover what a native culture was like. As a Spaniard, he seemed to delude himself into having a special rapport with Native Americans by passing himself off as a "non-white" and claiming to belong to the "Castilian" tribe. Although Leeds-Hurwitz offers textual evidence...