How was it that I reached this stage in my personal journey to be asked by Saul Kassin to contribute my story to this shared quest for professional self-understanding that he has orchestrated? I eagerly took up the opportunity to join this group of esteemed social psychologists in my explicit, and perhaps our implicit, quest to answer Bogan’s haunting challenge; the time to do so had come again, for I had tried to answer her challenge before, but the passage of time has shaped new apprehensions and the passing of too many colleagues in the last decade has added urgency to my quest to fathom an answer at this late stage of my career.

Like Ulysses, I am facing the Athens of retirement, whatever that terra incognita may bring. At this propitious moment, I believe that it is time for me to explore why and how this cross-cultural enterprise has sustained my restless mind for these last almost forty years. The exacting requirements of wide scholarship, attention to detail and statistical finesse would seem to run contrary to my dreamy, poetic proclivities. Somehow, though, our work, together and alone, has sustained me, and it might be instructive for younger readers to explore my understanding of that sustaining dynamic at this late stage in my career.

When awarded an Honorary Fellowship after thirty-three years of service to my chosen subdiscipline on the margins of mainstream psychology, I was moved to speechless poignancy by the recognition being accorded to me by my ‘home’ association. Why and how, I wonder, did things come to this high point? As Louise Bogan prods us to consider in her Journey round my room,

The problem at hand

Culture is the elephant of Sufi legend – complicated, obscure, and ponderous, a daunting Rorschach of puzzling complexity. Kynna, a character in Renault's (2002) Funeral Games, confronts an alien culture with this reaction:

The use of culture as a variable of interest in scientific psychology yields studies reporting arresting differences between cultural groups in whatever response is of interest to the psychologist – be it pace of life, helping behavior, public staring, physical proximity, the content of complaint letters to government officials, or apologizing. These observed differences provoke intriguing speculations about their origins. Such speculations are often embedded in “thick description” and comparison of the social systems in question, are historically informed, and consider institutionally diverse factors that may lead to the different observed outcomes. Scholars present these “explanations” with experience and insight into the cultures involved. Because most readers are novices with respect to the cultures concerned, they are persuaded by the sophisticated argumentation on offer. But is it right?

This chapter describes how we can develop and test models of cross-cultural differences. We argue that an analytical approach to culture is adequate to explain cross-cultural differences but that we should try to be as specific as possible in such explanations. Saying that a particular Chinese person has a strong family orientation (compared with a Westerner) because he or she is Chinese does not tell us much. It is more informative to say that Chinese have a strong family orientation because they have been socialized for greater dependency on the family compared with persons in Western cultures. Our approach focuses on the identification of cultural elements that can explain such cross-cultural differences; we then show how these elements perform their explanatory role.

When do I recall Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı coming into my life? My first recollection is of her introducing herself to me at the Kyoto International Conference Center in 1990. “I have been reading your work, and it's time we talked,” I recall her saying. We strolled out to the broad expanse of the quiet pond area behind the buzzing hall, and began a colleagueship that has lasted these eighteen years. One significant development in our rich relationship stands out for present purposes – Çiğdem's intellectual autobiography that I commissioned for a collection in which some of my cross-cultural heroes considered and described how they crafted their life and career in culture (Kağıtçıbaşı 1997). Çiğdem “crossed the Bosphorus” a decade before I crossed the Pacific, and her reflections on her “life-in-culture” provoked me then and now to rethink mine, ten years after I made my own first attempt at a career self-assessment (Bond 1997). This chapter is another step in the extended conversation I have been enjoying with Çiğdem, who is a muse for me as well as the doyen of Turkish psychology.