A group of practices for signalling meaning(s). This commonly means written texts, but has recently included economic, political, and social institutions, paintings, landscapes, and maps. Anthropologists view culture as a text. These texts have been exposed to the semiotic analyses associated with structuralism, and the deconstruction and discourse analyses of poststructuralism. The main foci of texts in geography have been the interpretation of maps as cultural texts (see Kokkonen (1998) Cartographia 35, 3–4 on cartography in the Baltic Sea) and the nature and usefulness of texts as a metaphor: ‘[a] metaphorical understanding of geography is popular because it suggests an alternative to both relativism and to naturalist conceptions of mimetic truth. These alternatives often involve rather different understandings of geography’ (Demeritt and Dyer (2002) Area 34, 3).