Reporting on nine months of fieldwork in Dahomey, Nigeria and the Gold Coast in 1931, Herskovits describes a society organized through cooperation at every level. Farming underpins everything, crafts are held by family guilds, and the dokpwe, the collective labour body Dahomeans speak of as the country's manpower, supplies the pattern. Women trade in the markets and keep what they earn, and successful traders may head households as titular husbands to wives of their own. He gives close attention to the ancestral cult, which he calls the stabilizing element of Dahomean society, to kinship terminology and to joking and avoidance between kin, and to the pantheons of the vodu. Charms, the gbo, he traces to several deities and to the forest being Aziza. He rejects fetishism as a label for West African religion, and records offerings made to relatives sold into slavery, with New World countries named aloud.