Laguerre studies Upper Belair, a poor quarter of Port-au-Prince, across three field visits between 1974 and 1976, adding archival work in church and private collections to reconstruct the quarter's history. He places the community at the bottom of a chain of dependency that runs from foreign capital through the Haitian bourgeoisie to the wholesaler, the market retailer and the household, and calls the resulting way of life a culture of dependency, meaning the survival strategies people build inside a structure that oppresses them. Market credit ties known as pratik, the bonus called degi, rotating credit associations and the folk lottery are read as mechanisms of that dependence. Household histories inside and outside the urban lakou, godparenthood and migration show how families absorb crowding and scarcity. Vodou temples and their priests appear as political institutions, with the priest acting as broker between residents and the local tonton macoute station.