Privilege and Place in Soviet Society

Abstract

Although regional geography has always held an affectionate place within our discipline, it has become tangential to the great majority of geographic research. There are of course good reasons for its low profile in both the schools and the universities. In the wave of the so-called ‘new geography’ of the 1950s and 1960s, with its emphasis on generalisations based on geometry and neo-classical location models, there was little room for the study of places and of the peoples who made them. As a profession we are now no longer trained in the broader perspectives of our forebears; our linguistic capabilities rarely extend beyond the arena of the English-speaking world, while sharp systematic divisions of labour within geography have resulted in the analytical fragmentation of societies. Rather than enhancing our comprehension of those complex and inter-related social, cultural, economic and political processes which mould the very fabric of the regions we claim to be studying, such academic specialisation has instead obscured a fuller regional understanding, at whatever scale.