Xooy is the tradition's public event. Held annually before the rainy season, most prominently at Fatick, it gathers saltigue from across the Serer country to deliver their readings of the year to come in front of a large audience that sits through the night. Each saltigue speaks in turn, in a formal and deliberately obscure style, and the pronouncements are debated afterwards against what actually happens. UNESCO inscribed Xooy on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013, noting both its standing in Serer life and the difficulty of transmitting the saltigue's knowledge.
The Ndut is the other institution that has held. It is the initiation through which Serer boys pass into adulthood: a withdrawal from the village into the bush for a period of seclusion and instruction, and a return with a changed status. What is taught during the seclusion belongs to those who have passed through it, and the atlas records the institution rather than its content.
The wider setting is a community that is now largely Muslim and substantially Catholic. The Serer resisted Islamisation for a long time, and the resistance is part of how the community remembers itself: the battle of Fandane-Thiouthioune in 1867, in which a Serer force under Maad a Sinig Kumba Ndoffene Famak Joof defeated a jihadist army, is the episode most often cited. Conversion came anyway, gradually and mostly without force, through the twentieth century. What is striking is how much survived the change of religious affiliation. Family shrines to the pangool, consultation of saltigue, the Ndut, and the funeral obligations owed to the dead are all still practised by people who would describe themselves as Muslim or Christian, and who see no contradiction requiring their attention.