Jaime de Angulo

Sebastian reads Angulo

Jaime de Angulo occupies the place depth psychology too easily romanticizes and scholarship too easily reduces to a footnote: the intermediary who crosses borders, carries voices, and never becomes fully at home in the institutions that use what he brings back. His writing moves among medicine, linguistics, memoir, fiction, song, and Native California narrative, making him difficult to classify without cutting away the very instability that gives the work its force. In the Seba library, he matters less as a model shaman than as a warning about the fantasy of that role. The person who mediates between worlds may be gifted, unreliable, wounded, self-mythologizing, ethically compromised, and socially outcast at once. The scholarly task is therefore double: to hear what de Angulo preserved while keeping visible the Indigenous sources, relations, and asymmetries that his Old Coyote legend can obscure. He is the figure to read when the marginal note begins carrying the argument—when a life dismissed as eccentric turns out to connect Jung, the Bay Area avant-garde, Native California language work, radio, myth, addiction, and the problem of who is authorized to tell another people’s stories.