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This massive study of the psychiatric beliefs and practices and the incidence of psychopathology in a small tribe of Colorado River Indians not only crowns the quarter of a century of work which Devereux has put into the study of this tribe; it is also an important landmark in the development of the social sciences. For the first time, to the best of my knowledge, technical social anthropology and a sophisticated psycho-analytical technique have been used simultaneously without the one set of concepts dominating the other. This is not merely an anthropological field-study illuminated by the author's psycho-analytic knowledge, nor is it the application of psycho-analytic insights to exotic 'primitive' material (as was the case with the late Géza Róheim's work, for example); the two disciplines are used concurrently, with no ambiguity about which frame of reference is being employed in any portion of the text. It is perhaps relevant that, as Devereux tells us, the greatest part of the data were gathered between 1932 and 1938, during three extended field-trips, when he was not only ignorant of the concepts of psycho-analysis but hoped to use his material (as Malinowski had done earlier) to question the basic postulates of psycho-analysis: 'the congruence of my Mohave data with psycho-analysis is not the result of a pre-existing bias. On the contrary, it was my dawning awareness of this congruence that caused me to become interested in psycho-analysis in the first place'. As a practising psycho-analyst, with a lively interest in theoretical concepts, Devereux has reinterpreted the material he gathered by the rigorous following of the techniques of social anthropology; but he also presents the bulk of these data in the form of prolonged interviews, dated field-notes with identified informants,