The lead influencer of this new direction was Jean Price-Mars. Price-Mars, an educator, ethnologist and thinker, studied closely Haitian society and its past. He searched experience, not just facts, to find the answers as to why Haiti arrived at a point of foreign control. His labours - thoughtful and exhaustive - were investigations of rural life, urban attitudes and, most profoundly, an archaeology of Haitian culture and customs that produced two important volumes. In the first, La vocation de lélite (The Vocation of the Elite) (1919), he chastised Haiti's elite classes for their denial of the Haitian peasantry as having a perceived lack of civilization. This social group, the largest population of Haitians, who were pejoratively called the moun andèyo (the outside people), were the real custodians of Haitian culture and an African way of life in the Republic. The more direct children of the eighteenth century revolutionaries, they were unconsciously the carriers of the African consciousness that Haiti's national imagination prided. And in their language, diet, customs and beliefs was a Haitian sensibility, truer and more determinative than the self-conscious Francophilia.  
The weight of his critique was great. Price-Mars' challenge was a rebuttal of the previous generation of Haitian intellectuals who, in spite of their racial pride, held French manners in the highest esteem. Price-Mars was the most respected intellectual in the country whose inspiration cast wide among educated urbanites. His words commanded attention. A decade after La Vocation de lélite came his most powerful treatise on these matters, the remarkable Ainsi Parla L'Oncle (So Uncle Said) (1928). In this collection of lectures on closely studied ethnographical research, African culture was explicitly identified as the core of Haitian identity. Price-Mars' assessment was scathing: