Social geography: its place and formation

The Soviet geographical literature of the last decade has adopted four principal, alternative premises about the place of social geography within the overall system of geography. These are that social geography: (1) does not exist as a separate branch of the subject; (2) belongs to a lower hierarchical order of geography, usually as a sub-division of population geography; (3) belongs to a medium level within the hierarchy of geography, broadly equivalent in status to economic geography; or (4) belongs to the highest hierarchical level of the subject, being synonymous with the geography of human society (sodetal geography). The author stresses the difference between the wider definition of social geography, which takes it to be the geography of society, studying the arrangement of sodetal objects in their geographical interrelations, and the narrow view, which defines ‘social’ as sociological. In this case, social geography is synonymous with sociological geography; it studies sociological objects in their geographical setting. The paper also discusses the process of the sociologization of geography.