[1] In it she reported on her anthropological fieldwork among the Lele people on the western bank of the Kasai River in the Basongo area of what had at the time been south-western Belgian Congo.

The changes subsequent to the ending of Belgian colonial rule in 1960 brought her to abandon the usual practice in anthropological field reports of writing in the present tense.

The tenth chapter, The Role of the Aristocratic Clan in Relations between Villages, sets out inter-village rivalries, "dominated by the idea of wiping out insults and injuries by killing men or capturing women", before discussing the role of the aristocratic Tundu clan, who claimed a sort of ritual ascendancy over the Lele as a whole but had no special political paramountcy.

Her analysis of the most senior of these, the Pangolin cult (reserved to those who had engendered a male and a female child with the same wife, among other restrictions), became a byword for Mary Douglas's ethnographic insight.

The final chapter, European Impact on Lele Society, describes the effects of colonial administration, the international cash economy, and missionary preaching.