Two contradictions frame Hurbon's account. Vodou took shape under slavery and helped bring it down, yet independent Haiti banned it and both state and Catholic Church spent the following century persecuting it. And when the elite finally acknowledged it in the 1930s as part of the national culture, the recognition was promptly exploited by a dictatorship that ran from 1957 to 1986.

Ritual and possession cannot be understood apart from that political history, which is also why the elite could not treat Vodou as a religion at all. What emerged from the meeting of African and European practice is something he describes as a dialogue with the other carried on internally — a religion with no ambition to conquer. Undoing the prejudice adherents have absorbed about themselves will take open public debate rather than ethnography, and a state that protects belief without legislating on it.