The Herskovitses went to Toco in 1939 expecting a village far from Port-of-Spain to preserve African worship in its purest form, and found no Shango there at all. That disappointment becomes the argument. Toco instead showed how people carried African meanings inside European forms, through what the authors call cultural focus, retention, readaptation and reinterpretation. The Shouters sect fits African worship into Protestant shape, Sankey and Moody hymns turn into shouts, and the local institution of keepers reconciles European monogamy with wider African definitions of kinship and plural marriage. Culture is learned rather than inherited biologically, borrowing is always selective, and resistance to imposed change is strongest in whatever a people care about most. Slavery figures as a specific historical sequence that stripped away the larger African institutions while leaving the intimate ones, which the authors connect to the standing of women as the principal bearers of culture across New World Black communities.