Price-Mars sets out to give Haitian folklore standing as an object of ethnography and to shame an elite that treats everything homegrown as an embarrassment. He borrows Jules de Gaultier's term bovarysme to name the collective habit of a society that conceives itself as other than it is, and dates that habit to the years after 1804, when the new nation put on the cast-off clothing of the country it had just defeated. Chapters on African peoples and their civilisations, on animism and on the religious life of the Haitian masses treat vodou as a coherent religion with traceable African roots, and popular tales and proverbs as literature. The material comes from evenings spent in peasant households collecting oral tradition, in which he separates African survivals, colonial French additions, faint indigenous traces and local invention. A closing lecture of 1922 defends the peasant family against clerical definitions of marriage.