BASIC CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES TO THE GEOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS OF THE POPULATION’S MENTALITY

Abstract

For the formation and establishment in geography of a new research area studying socio-geographical factors and features of the formation, reproduction and transformation of the mentality of the population, called in this article ethological geography, it is extremely important to define the premises. These not only determine the direction of scientific research but are themselves the subject of research, constantly being revised and supplemented with new foundations. Naturally, before formulating any scientific judgments, it is necessary to analyze the premises of other research areas within the same field. Basic conceptual approaches of the geographical analysis of the population’s mentality form a new methodological direction in social geography, justified in the article, – ethological geography. It is built into geographical science as a ‘conceptual joint’, being at the intersection of chorological, anthropogeographic, human geography, and cultural landscape approaches, continuing their methodological developments to solve its own special tasks. The new methodology does not require a theoretical rethinking of behavioral geography as it is shown in this paper as an independent direction in social geography. At the same time, ethological geography has a similar intention to behavioral geography, which appeared in the mid-1960s as an alternative to the then dominant positivism in spatial analysis, and it also reflects a trend toward the humanization of geography, its transformation into a science about people, not places. The article provides a synopsis of the main geographical approaches that the author considers to be initial for geography of mentality, interprets them, and provides the rationale for a synthetic approach to their use in socio-geographical studies of the mentality of the population.