Herskovits went to Mirebalais in central Haiti in 1934 and set out to describe an entire rural community rather than one exotic practice. The result answers, by demonstration, the foreign habit of reducing Haiti to drums and sorcery.

The valley lies some thirty-five miles from Port-au-Prince, with converted trucks running to the coast a few times a week: near the capital, and by every other measure far from it. Its economy rests not on employer and hired hand but on cooperative labour, the coumbite; its social organisation follows a logic of its own, which he traces back through Moreau de Saint-Méry to the parish's colonial beginnings.

A long section goes to vodun — pantheon, services, dances — and a later chapter to its dealings with Catholicism. That encounter is the theoretical payoff: vodun gave Herskovits his clearest instance of syncretism, and the valley gave him somewhere to watch it happen. Notes on method and a Creole glossary close the book.