Michel approaches Vodou as an educational system rather than an exotic survival, asking how its view of the world is handed from one generation to the next in a country where nearly everyone believes in the spirits while most profess Catholicism in public.

Vodou offers no scripture and no fixed code, she argues; adepts work out moral principles from the wisdom of elders, the lessons of a life, and their dealings with the lwa. The spirits teach by mirroring the whole range of human conduct, contradictions included, rather than by precept, which is why outsiders have wrongly concluded the religion has no morality. Children learn by imitation, young people through graded participation and responsibility, initiates through long apprenticeship. Competence is judged by style and by konesans, a knowledge that is both the means and the end of the training.

No settlement in Haiti, Michel concludes, will hold while the elite and foreign actors refuse this culture their respect.