ROLLING IN THE DITCHES WITH SHAMANS

When I saw remaindered a book called “Rolling in Ditches with Shamans,” I absolutely had to have it. Most of the people I know who are fascinated by shamans talk about psychedelic drugs and secret ceremonies -- not rolling in ditches. But what I know about shamans -- the real ones occasionally spotted around here -- is that’s not unlikely behavior at all. In fact, they are far less Zen-like than you would think and much more like sorcerers with not altogether laudable motives. Less mystic than opportunistic.

This book is not about shamans, but about anthropologists before there really were any anthropologists because the discipline in America was barely forming. Jaime De Angulo was a little later than Joaquin Miller and a little earlier than Gary Snyder but occupied roughly the same poetic territory in terms of geography and intellectual pursuits, as well as pioneering the “free life” on the Pacific coast while doing careful scholarship and husbanding two remarkable educated women. He owned a ranch in the coastal mountains and in his later years would appear as an apparition wearing nothing but waist-length hair and riding a horse. Those who visited him in his house (for a while he welcomed paying guests, saying that he was not quite starving but close to it) found that he’d moved his open fireplace to the middle and knocked a hole in the roof to vent the smoke.

In his early days Kroeber and Boas tried to guide and even suppress him. In fact, he learned anthropology directly from them rather than taking classes and some of their exasperation came from his ability to do fine work but never quite to their specifications and expectations. His first wife, Cary Fink, was a fellow student in medical school at Johns Hopkins where both took MD degrees. His second over-lapping wife, Nancy Freeland, was diverted from being a handmaiden of Kroeber. In the end his first wife, remarrying, joined the Jungians in Paris and his second wife returned to doing valuable anthropology. Psychoanalysis was also in its infancy and it’s clear that these most human of enterprises were coalescing out of the same raw material, perhaps driven by the experience of WWI.

Briefly, de Angulo was born to Spanish parents in Paris who migrated to the US. His photo on the dust jacket of this book shows a lean and handsome man in an open-necked shirt with a fleece of short hair and wire-rimmed spectacles. He is seated outdoors with a typewriter. Born in 1887, he died of cancer in 1950. His second wife, who had divorced him, moved him back into her home to care for him through the last two years. She lived until 1972. His bohemian but scholarly friends said his ghost was welcome with them any time. In the Seventies his spirit was revived by Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder and he was published again by Turtle Island. California Indians are generally scorned as not so romantic and “wild” as the Plains bison tribes, but de Angulo’s deep interest in California Indian language and mythology has proven to be timeless. Yet most people know little about him.

Partly this comes from the preoccupation with being “proper” middle-class orderly people that defended many of the influential early anthropologists. They spent most of their time in (aboriginal) university settings and knew that their tenure depended upon the English gentry type of upper-class probity -- at least on the surface. Short forays into wild places were supposed to be “for research purposes only” and one of the worst crimes was “going native.” But de Angulo was a rancher who employed Indians, rode with them, and got drunk with them. He rolled in the ditches and knew the shamans as far more than simply “informants.” Yet he never fabulized or made himself a hero in the way that Joaquin Miller or James Willard Schultz did. Never losing his MD creds, he read his anthropological stories aloud for the radio and made his life into a rolling seminar, always searching theories. Ezra Pound was a friend and mentor. And yet he teetered at the edge of professional anthropology in part because at first he was self-financed, using the money of his mother and wives, a mark of the amateur. When the discipline tightened in the Twenties, it was academic degrees, classwork and publishing that counted.

Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz is in a way doing “salvage anthropology” on the earliest anthropologists now that enough time has passed to take a “history of” approach. Her “field of specialization” on her professional website at University of Wisconsin-Parkside is described as: “Language and social interaction, ethnography of communication, intercultural communication, semiotics, communication theory, childhood socialization, history of the discipline, interdisciplinarity.” The coalescing of anthropology is now splitting again.

This book with the seductive and devil-may-care title is in fact very particular about describing de Angulo’s work. Recently retired from a long teaching career, Leeds-Hurwitz values the university context and clearly wanted to rescue de Angulo from being shrugged off as unimportant though he only taught briefly. There are other books that are more personally biographical. I’ve put them on my list.

One of the personal points of focus was a tragic auto accident in 1933 that killed de Angulo’s only son (he had several daughters) and badly damaged Jaime himself. That ended his professional work and seems to have changed his temperament. Given my family experience, I suspect his actual brain tissue was altered enough to derange the usual mechanisms of self-management.

What intrigues me is his participation in a webwork of personalities and pursuits that plainly laid the foundation for a strong current in our modern culture that values primitive people. Jaime was as fascinated as any hippie by what he called “the primitive mind” and the meaningfulness of myth. His life connected the South American peoples with Paris, Taos, Big Sur, San Francisco, always looking for the subterranean “catacombs” of the subconscious while still using the sharp scalpels of academic disciplines.

While this has touched Montana very lightly, de Angulo did have dealings with Clark Wissler, the primary anthropologist of the Blackfeet, and C. Hart Merriam (1855 -1942) who was also an MD, a natural history taxonomist and an ethnographer, which seems to be a nice term for self-taught anthropologists, esp. those who love myth.

Some might have said Jaime de Angulo was a “nagual.”