Ochi agha Imo State
 
 Ndi isi ala
 
 Oha n'eze
 
 Ekele na udo diri unu:
 
 Igbo bu Igbo; Igbo buru miri ga ogu kpo ya
 ijiriji; Kele nu:
 Igbo na aru ji, aru ede: Kele nu.
 Igbo n'azu ahia eke ukwu, azu eke nta: Kele nu:
Igbo n'azu ahia orie ukwu, azu orie nta: Kele nu:
 Igbo n'azu ahia afo ukwu, azu afo nta: Kele nu:
 Igbo n'azu ahia nkwo ukwu, azu nkwo nta: Kele nu:
 (3)
 
 INTRODUCTION
 
Thirty years ago, I faced the challenge of introducing Igbo society and culture to the world.
My response was The Igbo of Southeast Nigeria (Uchendu, 1965). Today, I face a more formidable challenge: the task of interpreting Igbo society to its custodians and its culture to its culture-bearers, and through them, to the world. My task is nor, unique. Since 1979; fourteen Ahiajoku Lecturers,
drawn from various disciplines and professions, had faced this challenge, each lecturer utilizing the most effective tools in his discipline: And they have succeeded in providing us with differing "windows" to Igbo culture.
 
As I address you, in the largest "classroom" for Igbo studies anywhere in the world, a Persian folktale comes to mind. There lived in Persia, in the 8th century, an Islamic teacher popularly called Mulla Nasrudim. He lost his key and came to the village square in search of it. Soon after, a villager arrived at the square, and seeing that the eyes of the learned man were attentively focused on the ground, and not wanting to disturb him, the villager, unobtrusively bent down and started an aimless search. After a few minutes which appeared to have stretched into hours, the villager mustered some courage and asked the learned man: ”What are you looking for, Mulla?"
"My key", said the Mulla.
 
 The villager became better focused, went down on his knees and diligently looked for the Mulla's key.
 After a while, the villager became curious and asked the Mulla:
 
 "Where exactly did you lose the key?" "In my house", the Mulla replied.
 "Then, why are you 1boking for the key you lost in your house in the village square?", asked the villager.
 
 "There is more light in the village square than inside my own house", answered the Mulla.
 
Mr. Chairman, this lecture could have been given anywhere: in a classroom; at a symposium or as an "after-dinner" talk; but I assure you that I find "more light" among you today than I could have ever found anywhere else in the world.
 
The topic for my lecture is EZI NA ULO: The Extended Family in Igbo Civilization. In selecting this topic, I was mindful of the limitations which "generative ideas ---the wealth of formulative notions with which the mind meets experiences" impose on human understanding. According to Susanne Langer (1962:19-31), a Harvard philosopher, a generative idea is like ...a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form for us before the light fell on them. Yet it is the most natural and appropriate thing in the world for a new terminology to have a vogue that
crowds out everything else for a while. It becomes a word that everyone snaps up... the "Open Sesame" of new positive science. The sudden vogue of such a key-idea is due to the fact that all sensitive and active minds turn at once to exploit it, we try it in every connection, for every purpose, experiment with possible stretches of its strict meaning, with generalizations and derivatives.
 
Whether or not EZI NA ULO is, in fact, a centrally important scientific concept for the analysis of Igbo civilization, I don't know. What I do know is that no single concept can resolve so many fundamental problems at once and also promise to resolve all fundamental problems, clarify all obscure issues for all times.
 
We are interested in furthering our understanding of Igbo culture through analysis and explanation. In his The Savage Mind, the French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss (1966) remarks that scientific explanation does not consist, as we have been taught to accept, in the reduction of the complex to the simple. Rather, what the analyst seems to confront is the substitution of a complexity more intelligible for one which is less. With specific reference to the study of man, Clifford Geertz  (1975:33) argues that the explanation of cultural behavior often consists of "substituting complex pictures for simple ones, while striving somehow to retain the persuasive clarity that went with simple ones". These contrasting positions seem to put Alfred North Whitehead's advice to natural scientists on its head. Whitehead urged natural scientists that in the process of understanding they should "seek simplicity and to distrust it". On the other hand, the social scientists tend to "seek complexity and order it" (Geertz, 1975:34).
 
Our approach would lie mid-way between idiographic and nomothetic, that is, between situation-centered
description and law-seeking global generalizations, without ignoring either. Our analytical strategy is anthropological, not in terms of techniques and received procedure6 which define the traditional anthropological enterprise, but in what Clifford Geertz (1975:34), drawing from the collected works of Gilbert Ryle calls "thick description". In hi essays, Thinking and reflecting" and "The thinking of thoughts", Gilbert Ryle illustrates the method of inferring cultural behavior from ethnography.
 
Ethnography is a scientific process of observing and recording field data and also an end result.
As an end result, ethnography is a historical document created by the ethnographer to assist him in cultural comparison and analysis and it serves others as a source-book for history. It is in "doing ethnography" that the distinction which Ryle makes between "thick" and "thin” descriptions can be illustrated.
 
Consider two boys, Okorie and Nwafo, rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes. In Okorie, this is an involuntary twitch; in Nwafor, a conspiratorial signal to Mgbokwo hiding away from the observer. From a phenomenalistic point of view, the two eye movements are, as movements, identical. The observer could not distinguish which was twitch and which was wink or indeed "whether both or either was twitch or wink". Yet, in terms of communication and cultural analysis, the difference between a twitch and a wink is vast. The winker is communicating precise information in a unique medium. His message is deliberate; it is addressed to someone in particular. The content of the message is specific; and the mode of communication is through a socially established code; and the message is strictly inter-personal and not public. "Contracting your eyelids on purpose when there exists a public code in which so doing counts as a conspiratorial signal is winking" (Geertz, 1975:6). It is a "fleck of culture".
 
The description "thickens" when a third boy, Okonkwo, enters the picture. Innocently assuming that Okorie and Nwafor were engaged in a twitching contest, and asking a poor job of it, their efforts appearing amusing, clumsy and amateurish, Okonkwo began to parody the two boys, laboriously exaggerating their patterns of twitching, and dramatizing his mimicking abilities. If he does not find his efforts satisfactory, he could practice twitching