A community study of Toco, on the northeast coast of Trinidad, offered not as a portrait complete in itself but as one specimen within the range of New World Negro cultures, to be read against both its African past and its functioning present.

The analysis rests on stated premises. Culture is learned rather than issued with the body, so a tradition devised by one people can be taken up by any other given the chance to learn it. Contact quickens borrowing, but the particular circumstances of a contact decide how much of the old survives, and what is adopted is reworked rather than swallowed whole.

Borrowing is also uneven. It gathers where a people's interest already lies — the cultural focus — which in settled conditions makes that the most receptive zone and, where change is forced, the most stubbornly defended. Toco's religious life is examined with these propositions in hand.