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This lecture on the Igbo “family and home” is at once a detailed study of the core components, complexity, and values of Igbo social organization, and at the same time a lecture in anthropological theory and a study in dialectical anthropology. In his introduction, the author who was himself an insider of Igbo culture, points to the challenge of interpreting Igbo society to its custodians and culture bearers . Reflecting on ethnography and interpretations of culture, he illustrates his comments with an Iranian folk tale as well as references to Susanne Langer, Claude Levi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Gilbert Ryle, Alfred N. Whitehead, and Chinua Achebe Uchendu begins with the general possibility of profiling a culture along two clusters of culture traits such as Ezi and Ulo, as separately identifiable units of Igbo cultural organization against anthropological theories, proposed by Clyde Kluckhohn, Clifford Geertz, Max Weber, Victor Uchendu, Ralph Linton. Margaret Mead, and Chinua Achebe, In his next step, Uchendu profiles Igbo culture specifically, as complex and holistic, and immediately warns against two type of academic pitfalls evoked by the culture’s specifics: I) Foreign scholars’ surprise and fascination with an open, decentralized society whose “strength and resilience under stress” is found in features other than “a single over-arching institution,” that is monolithic state power, 2)... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]