The practical religion of an Igbo village turns on land, law and time rather than on doctrine. Ala is the earth as a person: she owns the ground, receives the dead into it, and holds the code of conduct. Offences that break that code are nso ala, abominations against the earth, and the category is precise rather than vague. It has historically covered homicide within the community, theft of yams, incest, and a birth or death that violated the accepted order. What makes nso ala distinctive is that the pollution is public. It attaches to the land and the lineage, not only to the offender, so the remedy is a public sacrifice and cleansing performed by the earth priest rather than a private penance.
Authority to speak for a lineage is held physically. The ofo is a staff, cut from a particular tree, passed to the eldest surviving man of a line, and understood to carry the assent of the ancestors. Divination, healing and the reading of misfortune belong to the dibia, who are consulted about causes rather than symptoms, and whose work assumes that a serious illness or a run of losses has a reason somewhere in the relations between a person, their chi, their ancestors and an offended alusi.
Time is counted in a four-day week, eke, orie, afo and nkwo, each named for a market, so that the ritual calendar and the trading calendar are the same calendar. Christianity arrived with the missions of the 1840s and, unusually, spread very fast; most Igbo people today are Christian. Odinani did not so much end as move: masquerade societies, title-taking, funeral obligations to the ndichie and the sense that the earth can be offended continue, sometimes openly, sometimes inside a Christian frame that its practitioners see no need to reconcile.