Seventy years of argument over whether Haitian zombis and cannibalism are real had settled little, so Bourguignon sets the question of evidence aside and asks what peasants take these stories to mean. Fieldwork carried out in 1947 and 1948 supplies the anecdotes: sorcerers who promise kin to bought deities, werewolves who drain the strength of children, people turned into cattle and sold for meat, corpses revived and kept from salt so they cannot recall their own names. Running through all of it is the phrase mange moun, to eat people, which also names the feeding of the gods, the dead, and one's own head spirit. She reads the beliefs as a linked system of oral aggression that accounts for illness, death and, above all, the suspect wealth of successful priests and politicians. Hostility that cannot be aimed at elders and superiors in a strictly hierarchical society gets displaced onto sorcerers and demons.