Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Given how people use proximity and distance as metaphors for similarity and difference, a study of the way we “categorize” things provides a window into our phenomenology of distance, and doing so transcontextually reveals its fundamentally generic features. Exploring parallel manifestations of such phenomenology in diverse contexts such as space, time, and social group membership, Small Steps and Giant Leaps thus demonstrates that the way we divide a city into “neighborhoods” strikingly resembles the way we divide history into conventional “periods” and the way we view people as members of supposedly distinct ethnoracial “groups.” It also reveals the parallel symbolic significance of adoption ceremonies, New Year’s parties, and the ritual display of passports upon crossing international borders. And it likewise reveals the parallel manners in which we have traditionally polarized our conventional visions of masculinity and femininity as well as of humanity and animality. Viewing distance “topologically,” we tend to downplay within-category differences and thereby mentally “compress” within-category “distances” while emphasizing between-category differences and thereby “stretching” between-category “distances.” We do so collectively, as members of epistemic communities sharing the same norms, conventions, and traditions of categorizing. When lumping “similar” things together and splitting “different” categories from one another, we do so as social beings. Categorizing involves the social construction of both similarity and difference, as things are neither inherently similar to nor inherently different from one another, and it is attentional norms rather than “logic” that determine which differences “make a difference” and which ones we can effectively disregard.</jats:p>