From Describing to Reconstructing Life Trajectories: How the TEA (Trajectory Equifinality Approach) explicates context-dependent human phenomena 1 , 2 Tatsuya Sato, Yuko Yasuda, Mami Kanzaki (Ritsumeikan University, Japan) and Jaan Valsiner (Aalborg University, Denmark). Culture is a difficult term to define. It is similar to any other meta-level notion. We easily use them—but the very moment we are asked to clarify their meaning we are in trouble. We may end up giving very general explanations. Thus, Klempe (2013) started his lecture on cultural psychology in Aalborg with the most basic understanding that culture is about everything human beings are experiencing. But how do we experience everything? What is the value of bringing the notion of culture as a general scientific term back to psychology? Crossroad within psychology In psychology as a scientific discipline, there are two different approaches to treat cultural phenomenon. One of these is habitually called cross-cultural psychology and another -- cultural psychology. Why this distinction? Cross-cultural psychology often employs (but is not necessarily limited to) the traditional strategy of group comparisons in establishing knowledge about the abstract collective entities psychologists call “cultures” (Valsiner, 2003; Fig.1). Each person in Japan can be said to “belong to” the abstract conglomerate of human beings unified the label “the Japanese culture”. Similarly, people in Jylland and Saelland are assumed to “belong” to the “Danish culture”. Cross-cultural psychologists would then proceed to compare samples from each with one another, assuming that the “cultures” that are thus compared are qualitatively homogeneous abstract entities. From this viewpoint, 1 This chapter is based on the lecture at Two Seminars in Aalborg: Inauguration of the Niels Bohr Professorship, on March, 15, 2013—“Methodological affordances of TEM (Trajectory Equifinality Model)” 2 Authors especially thank to communication with Brady Wagoner and Nandita Chaudhary .