“Cultural branch” of human geography in contemporary Russia: Genesis, main peculiarities, and priorities of development

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the historical origins, specific features, development trends, and key issues, as well as priority areas and prospects for development, of the cultural and geographic branch of Russian human geography. In the global academic landscape, this discipline is known as cultural geography. Two concepts are used on the national research scene: geography of culture or cultural geography. The relationship between these two concepts is discussed. The paper analyzes how anthropological and cultural traditions inherited from the pre-Soviet period of Russian geographic science and the research approaches of anthropogeography of the early Soviet period have influenced the field of cultural geographic research in Russia. The consequences of the period of oblivion of humanistic traditions in Russian anthropogeography, which marked the end of the 1920s-beginning of the 1930s, for the development of economic geography in the USSR are investigated. The orientation of national human geography toward the cultural geographic dimension at the end of the last century is explored. Key features and development trends that were characteristic of Russian geography of culture or cultural geography over the past quarter-century are discussed. Statistical data on dissertations in the field of geoculture between 1995 and 2012 in Russia are aggregated and analyzed. Special attention is paid to the assessment of major problems and priority areas of cultural and geographic research in view of general trends and prospects for the development of modern human geography in Russia. It is concluded that the potential of cultural geography in Russia has not yet been fully tapped into. The theoretical and methodological framework of cultural geography should be developed further. In addition, research in this area is highly fragmented and suffers from a lack of coordination and dissociation with other areas of human geography. The authors point to the rise of “neoculturalization” in national geographic science, which is based on a closer relationship of geography of culture and cultural geography with other disciplines of human geography.