Social construction of geographicity: A vision from humanistic geography

Abstract

Society is a human construct in a continuous historical process, hence, also geographical. The Social is always composed of a temporal and spatial dimension and, therefore, necessarily endowed with historicity and geographicity. According to Dardel (2022), geographicity is the existential connection of the human being with the earth, that is, the spatial experience obtained by the subjective apprehension of the objective world. This article aims to establish a revaluation of the concept of geographicity in the social sciences debate, discerning it as a social construct by considering theoretical foundations from humanistic geography, phenomenology, and the sociology of knowledge, linked as a proposal for an epistemological alternative in the field of theoretical geography itself. The concepts of space, landscape, place, perception of space, material space, conceived space, and lived space are the key concepts that interlace the dialectical relationship between the objective and subjective manifestations of reality, as a way of socially constructing geography. The result is, therefore, the evident epistemic fertility of humanistic geography, presented in this work through the theoretical review regarding a social construction of geographicity.