The Dictionary of Human Geography

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Like all academic disciplines, human

geography involves the interpretation of texts,

understood as a corpus of written or printed

material: first-order texts such ascensusre-

cords, diaries and transcriptions (convention-

ally called ‘sources’ – but this is misleading,

since they are complex transcriptions and cod-

ings, whose origins lie elsewhere, and they are

as often as not sedimentations of multiple,

sometimes contradictory layers of meanings);

and second-order texts (articles, monographs,

dictionaries) that offer competing interpret-

ations of those interpretations. This may seem

commonplace, but it is not: ‘reading’ and ‘writ-

ing’ are not often included in discussions of

methodology, yet they are central to the prac-

tice of geographical enquiry. They also have

their own geographies, and Livingstone

(2005a) has argued for an historical geography

of textual circulation and interpretation.

Influenced byactor-network theory, he de-

scribes written texts as ‘immutable mobiles’,

which means that ‘knowledge does not move

around the world as an immaterial entity’.

Livingstone argues that the production and re-

ception of texts are practices thattake placein

material spaces, and that geographers should

attend to the geographical conditions of the en-

gagement between texts and readers that trans-

form interpretations and exclude as well as

include audiences. In another sense, of course,

this makes texts highlymutablemobiles: they are

constantly subject to new interpretations and

produce new effects (Ogborn, 2007).

These ideas have been extended still further

to treat all productions ofmaterial culture

as texts, including maps and landscapes.

This work has been influenced by post-

structuralismand sees cultural productions

as unstable practices of meaning-making. At-

tention is focused on a multiplicity of compet-

ing meanings: hence ambiguity, volatility and

a politics of interpretation. The core argument

is that the principal characteristics of written

discourse also describe social life: meaning

in written texts is concretized through inscrip-

tion, so social practices are concretized in

the material landscape; as authors’ intentions

and the reception of texts often fail to coin-

cide, so social practices become detached from

the consciousness of agents whose collective

actions constitute such practices; written texts

are reinterpreted under changing circumstan-

ces just as social events are continually reinter-

preted; and as the meaning of written texts is

unstable and dependent on interpretations of

readers, so social action and institutions are

open to a multiplicity of interpretations.

Post-structuralism has had a considerable

influence on the reading of maps as texts

(Harley, 1989; see cartography, history

of), but readings of landscape as text have

a more complex genealogy (Duncan and

Duncan, 1988). Although cultural geograph-

ers have long regarded landscapes as palimp-

sests of culture–nature interactions to be read

by specialists, notably themselves, many of

those who have adopted the metaphor of

landscape as text have eschewed the role of

the ‘expert decoder’ in favour of an ostensibly

reciprocal approach to landscape interpret-

ation that moves in ahermeneuticcircle. A

key influence here has been the recovery of

multiple layers of meaning through thethick

descriptionof American anthropologist Clif-

ford Geertz (1926–2006) rather than their de-

stabilization through thedeconstructionof

Derrida. Geertz’s hermeneutic–ethnographic

approach to culture as text has guided the

recovery of multiple readings proffered not

by experts on the history of a generic land-

scape type but, instead, constructed by people

who inhabit a particular landscape and who

mobilize different readings as part of a politics

that is central to its lively production and

transformation (Duncan, 1990). And yet the

recovery, reproduction and transmission of

those constructions and contestations for a

wider public audience is hardly the work of

non-experts: not only do ‘first-order’ and

‘second-order’ texts bleed into one another,

but the composite textualizations provided by

Geertz may be read as the articulations of ‘an

invisible voice of authority who declares what

the you-transformed-to-a-they experience’

(Crapanzo, 1986, p. 74; see also Gregory,

1994, pp. 147–8).

Many geographers have questioned the use-

fulness of the text metaphor altogether, argu-

ing that it leads to an over-emphasis on

communication, intentionality and the discur-

sive rather than the material or unintended

(cf.non-representational theory). Defend-

ers of the metaphor respond by arguing that

cultural productions with text-like qualities

(such as landscapes) are heterogeneous, ma-

terial realities that are mutually constitutive

with reading practices and interact with other

non-human processes. It is also argued that

landscapes are normally read inattentatively

or subconsciously, so that the norms and val-

ues that shape the landscape become natural-

izedand unconsciouslyabsorbed. There are

further differences of opinion on the degree

of fluidity or stability of cultural practices

and productions, and on the extent to which

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