Bourguignon steps aside from the long quarrel over whether Haitians really practice cannibalism or make zombis, on the grounds that proving or disproving the reports has taught nobody anything. What matters is that the beliefs are held, discussed daily and acted upon, and so form part of the world the peasant actually inhabits.

Treating the anecdotes as folklore, she traces how they hang together. The phrase mange moun covers a wide range of harms, from a sorcerer's debt to a purchased deity to a werewolf draining a child at night, all of them figured as eating, and all supplying an account of illness, death and sudden fortune that natural causes do not. Hostility that cannot be aimed at those with power over one is displaced onto these beings.

Sorcery belief and the vodun cult, she concludes, sustain each other: the danger and the protection issue from the same source.