Twelve chapters, gathered under the auspices of KOSANBA, the scholarly association for the study of Haitian Vodou founded in 1997, treat the religion as a worldview that shapes family structure, healing, economics and politics well beyond the temple. Contributors work from fieldwork, texts and objects. Karen McCarthy Brown analyses healing in its widest sense; Pierre Minn examines how heat and illness are understood in one Haitian town; Leslie Desmangles finds African meanings in the cross and the veve; LeGrace Benson traces Islamic elements carried by enslaved Muslims; Anna Wexler studies sequined flags and the stories told about their origin. Elizabeth McAlister follows the figure of the Jew through rara, showing a colonial demonology absorbed and reworked by people themselves demonised. Carrol Coates surveys novelists whose fiction has warmed toward Vodou, evidence of its growing acceptance among educated Haitians, and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith argues that development and democracy fail when they bypass Kreyol and the religion most Haitians practise.