2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Text and textuality entered geography when some human geographers abandoned positivist science and modeled their scholarship on literary criticism. Text was historically understood to be a verbal artifact; the purpose of textual criticism was to preserve such documents in uncorrupted and accessible form. Geographers have limited experience with this sort of textual criticism. The literary criticism on which geographers modeled post-positivist geography was primarily interpretive. Just before geographers joined in this enterprise, textual interpretation had been expanded under post-structuralism. In post-structuralism, text denoted not only verbal artifacts, but any configuration of signs, and texts were understood to be indeterminate and open to multiple readings, determined by the hermeneutics interpretive communities. Three interpretive communities emerged in the hermeneutic disciplines, and geography. A semiotic hermeneutics reads culture and landscape as texts that express the sensibility of a people. The second and third hermeneutics are hermeneutics of suspicion. Deconstruction reads the text of conceptual and metaphysical assumptions that appears to stand behind positivist geography as an illusory ontology. Knowledge/power interpretation reads the texts of discourses that minutely infiltrate life and thought as instruments of oppression. Text and textuality helped create a post-positivist geography; however these concepts encourage overinterpretation, category mistakes, and utopianism.
