Drawing on fieldwork in the Marbial valley above Jacmel, Bastien describes how Haitian peasant families were actually organized, and how the arrangement was coming apart. His starting unit is the lakou, a cluster of huts on undivided family land, each household farming its own plot, presided over by a met whose authority is real over sons and largely ceremonial over cousins.

Land holds the arrangement together and also destroys it. A father parcels his holdings informally among his children, daughters included; at his death, vague boundaries, unrecognized heirs and defective titles produce lawsuits that break families, and the costs push peasants off the very land they fought to keep. Each lakou has its own graveyard and its inherited spirits, so the ground is ancestral as much as economic.

Bastien reads the resulting fragmentation, alongside erosion and population growth, as the setting for Haiti's agricultural crisis.