“Cultural Branch” of Human Geography in Contemporary Russia: Genesis, Main Peculiarities, and Priorities of Development

Abstract

This paper presents the overview of the historical origins, specifi c features, development trends, and key issues of development for the cultural-geographic branch of the 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 impact of anthropological and cultural traditions, inherited from the pre–Soviet period of the Russian geographic science and anthropogeographic research approaches of the early Soviet period, on the development of cultural geographic research in Russia is analyzed. The consequences of the period of oblivion of the humanistic traditions in the Russian anthropogeography, which marked the cusp of the 1920s–1930s, for the development of economic geography in the USSR are investigated. The orientation of the national human geography towards the cultural geographic dimension at the end of the last century is explored. Statistical data on dissertations defended in the fi eld of geoculture between 1995 and 2012 in Russia are analyzed. Special attention is paid to the assessment of major problems and priority areas of cultural and geographical 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 has to be further developed. The authors point to the rise of the phenomenon of “neoculturalization” in the national geographic science based on a closer relation between cultural geography with other disciplines of human geography.