Drawn from fieldwork in 1931, this survey moves through four aspects of Dahomean life. It opens with the economy: every man farms whatever else he does, and women run the markets and keep what they earn, which supports a recognized class of independent women.

Collective labour is organized through the dokpwe, an association of a community's men under a chief who inherits his post and whose duties link communal farming to the conduct of funerals. A sick man's fields are worked for him as a matter of course. Above all this stood the absolutism of the monarchy.

Herskovits then considers people who fit their own culture badly, artists especially, and closes on religion. He rejects the idea of Mawu as a supreme god on the Christian pattern, arguing that the great deities name pantheons rather than persons, and treats charms revealed to hunters by the forest creature Aziza as sympathetic magic that no longer justifies the word fetishism.