Distance is a central concern for global historians. It is a physical and external condition of social life that global processes bridge. Exchanges, encounters and conflicts between strangers are common themes of global historians. Distance is also a cultural and conceptual condition, one that defines relations between strangers far – and near. Mobility and the advent of new modes of transportation and communications had ambiguous effects of closing the gap between strangers while heightening social distances, the need to explain them and policies to redress them.

This full introduction compares geography today and in antiquity, and characterizes its place in modern Classical scholarship. It asks whether Greek geographical writings have been classified correctly, and offers new perspectives on the social context in which they were composed, emphasizing their grounding in lived experience. Concepts such as periplous are explained, but the use of ‘genre’ to account for the forms of prose writing that we possess is questioned. This leads to a discussion of the helpful notion of ‘common sense geography’. The characteristic topics covered by Greek geographers are surveyed, with a particular focus on change and instability. Discussion of techniques of distance measurement on land and at sea, the role of maps in antiquity, and ‘mental mapping’ is followed by a detailed survey of extant geographical writings and of geographical material within ancient philosophy, historiography, and poetry. I complete the chapter with a discussion of the texts selected for the volume, the fragile transmission process by which these mainly short or fragmentary texts have survived, the organization of the volume, and how the translation process has been managed.

When firms interact with foreign markets, they have to deal with challenges not faced on the domestic market as transport- and interaction costs are higher. This holds for all types of interactions, such as geographical, socio-economic, cultural and institutional distance. When interacting with foreign markets, firms have to overcome this liability of distance and foreignness. An illustration of its importance is the dominance of nearby trade- and investment flows, as shown by the gravity model. We also review the decision of firms to interact via trade flows or multinational activities, where scale economies, transport costs, market size and local production costs all play a crucial role. The proximity versus concentration trade-off explains the choice of exporting versus horizontal FDI. The difference in production costs versus transport costs explains the choice of producing at home versus offshoring (vertical FDI). We conclude with a brief review of the global economic system.

The Coda returns to the example with which the book begins: the story about the gentleman caller and the naked lady in the bathroom told by the character Fabienne in Truffaut’s film Stolen Kisses (1968). The aim of the Coda is to revisit key aspects of the theory and history of tact developed in the course of the book, and to draw its findings to a close.

Existing theories of human interaction tend to focus on tact as a marker of social distinction (Sartre, Bourdieu), and a tool for the cementation of bourgeois power (Foucault). The introduction sets the arena for a new account of tact that not only considers tact’s discriminating effects but also, and primarily, gives room to its equalizing dynamic and democratic potential. Using a story from Truffaut’s film Stolen Kisses (1968) about a gentleman and a naked lady in a bathroom as an example to unpack some of the key aspects of tact, I engage in critical dialogue with a wide range of scholars from different disciplines (including Wollheim, Kohut, Coplan, Luhmann, Derrida, Goffman, Žižek, Sartre, and Sennett). The aim is to address the following questions: What is tact? What is the relation between empathy, widely associated with proximity, and tact as a generator of distance? How can we distinguish tact from politeness and what are the implications of this distinction? How does social tact, as the spontaneous and individual art of mitigating social encounter, relate to hermeneutical tact as a particular mode of reading faces, images, texts?

Chapter 2 looks at Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in the context of the Belle Époque as an age characterised by the disintegration of existing hierarchies, norms, and conventions. I start out by considering the novel’s long-lost earliest drafts, Les Soixante-quinze feuillets, to then focus on close readings of a series of encounters between Marcel, Charlus, Albertine, and Andrée. Tact, Proust’s novel suggests, can be interpreted as an egalitarian force, indicating an equilibrium between the people involved. At the same time, it can also be seen as a creator of power imbalance, and a marker of social distinction. This conflict gives rise to a number of questions: Is tact a moral or an amoral category? Where do we draw the line between tact, hypocrisy, and lying? How do we deal with the uncertainty of interpretation as it begins to turn into one of the narrator’s most tantalizing concerns? Drawing on a variety of different theorists of tact (incl. Kant, Schopenhauer, Simmel, Sartre, Gadamer, Hall, Bourdieu, Goffman, Luhmann), I describe Proust’s tact as a paradoxical category that oscillates between autonomy and control, classification and declassification.

Chapter 4 reads Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses (1968) in the light of the historical crisis from which it arose. Mapping the film against selected material from earlier versions of the script, director’s notes, letters, and interviews, I interpret Stolen Kisses against the grain of its conventional reception as a romantic comedy. I show how, while sympathetic to the revolutionary cause, the film occupied a bystander position in relation to the political parties involved in the conflict. Against ideologies of fusional collectivity, Truffaut experiments with new forms of individuality, freedom, and communication. In striking resemblance to Plessner’s theory of tact, he shows how tactful behaviour can facilitate ways to come close to one another without meeting, and drift apart again without damaging one another through indifference. Counter to the widespread expectation that when relations are close, they are warm, and when they are warm, they are beneficial to all individuals involved, intimacies do not necessarily bring us closer together. On the contrary, inasmuch as they may infringe upon the singularity and dignity of the individual, they can have a deeply alienating effect.

Chapter 3 looks at Plessner’s Limits of Community (1924) and Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1951) to show that, despite their conflicting theoretical assumptions, both thinkers arrive at surprisingly similar conclusions. Both fundamentally disagree on various key concepts that shape their theories of tact: alienation, for example, is for Adorno a temporary state of human existence that we need to overcome. For Plessner, by contrast, it is what makes us human in the first place, setting us apart from animals and plants. And yet, both share a suspicion of certain forms of intimacy and touch, and a preference for individual difference over communal identification. In my close analysis of their writing, I argue that Plessner’s and Adorno’s theories of tact contribute to an ethic of indirectness that defies any strategies of incorporation. On a hermeneutic level, they allow us to develop new modes of non-violent contemplation. On a social level, they find their literal realisation in times of a pandemic, when keeping your distance and wearing a mask can be interpreted as a dystopic sign of isolation, while it can also be seen as an expression of cooperation (not fusion), solicitude, and care.

Australian metal music is notably diverse. Although the country’s metal output is proportionate to its population size, many trend-challenging and genre-defining bands have emerged from this community. These bands – indeed all Australian metal bands – have forged their careers in constant negotiation with their distance from international scenic hubs and from one another. This negotiation, in its varied forms, has imprinted on the musical and paramusical texts of many Australian metal artists, many of whom have responded with defiant and convention-challenging practice. This chapter, within a cursory overview of Australian metal music history, explores the work of three such bands: Buffalo, a proto-heavy metal band from the late 1960s; Sadistik Exekution, a death metal band formed in the mid−1980s; and Ne Obliviscaris, a progressive extreme metal band that has been mainstay of Australian metal since the early 2000s. These three bands are demonstrative of the variability and inventiveness of Australian metal. They also exemplify the way answers to these common distance-related pressures, negotiated through obstinate artistic vision and culturally shaped ideals, can result in inimitable music and art.

We don’t always have a single response variable, and disciplines like community ecology or the new “omics” bring rich datasets. Chapters 14–16 introduce the treatment of these multivariate data, with multiple variables recorded for each unit or “object.” We start with how we measure association between variables and use eigenanalysis to reduce the original variables to a smaller number of summary components or functions while retaining most of the variation. Then we look at the broad range of measures of dissimilarity or distance between objects based on the variables. Both approaches allow examination of relationships among objects and can be used in linear modeling when response and predictor variables are identified. We also highlight the important role of transformations and standardizations when interpreting multivariate analyses.

Chapter 4 provides a rich ethnographic analysis of everyday transnational practices of relatedness, including calling, texting, visiting, and sending remittances. It begins by considering power and affect in moral economies of transnational kinship, along with various communicative means of staying in touch across space, to illuminate the factors, contexts, and modes that inform the ways in which kinship dilemmas are experienced. What follows is a look at interactions and exchanges in which kin draw on the discourses and logics of ‘tradition’ and born-again Christianity to negotiate what being related means and entails. In considering specific familial dilemmas, I show how they call into question ideas of migrant personhood and who is materially responsible for whom, illuminating the moral, affective, material, and existential stakes of these transnational practices.

Much migration research takes as its point of departure the migrant and the act of migration. In contrast, the Introduction foregrounds migrants and their families, treating migration projects like those at the heart of the book as domains of interaction between those who move and those who stay. It introduces and situates key concepts and topics, including ‘moral economies of transnational kinship’, imagination and distance, Christianity, and generation. The Introduction also discusses migrants’ arrival in the United Kingdom and the immigration context at the time, as well as the methodology used in conducting multi-sited fieldwork. It concludes with an outline of the book’s six chapters, which consider moral economies of transnational kinship from multiple perspectives and angles, from multiple social and geographic locations.

In the Conclusion, I reflect on the importance of adopting a generational, life-stage, and gendered lens to the study of transnational families. Close consideration of the interplay between physical, social, and phenomenological distance in transnational families demonstrates that the experience of distance is affectively mediated and inevitably relative, just as the meaning of relatedness is negotiated over time and across space. Since economic and social processes are always made sense of from particular social locations, the Conclusion underscores how attention to familial transformations is productive for understanding wider social change.