Foreign travellers and the international press have long cast Haiti as the land of zombies and sinister rites. Laguerre sets that literature aside and treats Vodou instead as a factor in the distribution of power, one that helps structure relations among the country's social sectors and whose political dimension, he argues, has never been examined systematically.

His account is historical. Under slavery Vodou served as a channel for a movement seeking religious, cultural and political freedom when no institutional means existed. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the state's policies shaped how the religion organised itself, while the religion in turn worked its way into politics at local and national level.

Its ideology, ritual and dealings with the state therefore changed as circumstances did, and Laguerre presents its politics as largely reactive, formed in response to constraints generated elsewhere in society.