A Journey around the Territory. — Man is an economic, social and cultural animal. Space is, for geographers, both a structure and a system in which social and economic parameters play a role; but space, for the men who live in it, is also a territory, which they see through the lenses of their culture. This territory is linked to the ethnic identity and the culture which gives it form. Translated into spatial terms, the concept of culture must inevitably raise the concept of territory. In fact it is the existence of the culture which creates the territory, and it is the territory which makes manifest the symbolic relationship between culture and space. Territory is then a " geosymbol " ; that is, a place, an itinerary, a space, which acquires in the eyes of ethnic groups and peoples the cultural and symbolic dimension in which their values are rooted and through which their identity is affirmed.
As is well known, political events disturbed the archipelago of Vanuatu's accession to indepen- dence. Apart from immediate causes there are — as much in the archipelago's past and the nature of its physical aspect as in its culture — deep causes which made this crisis practically unavoidable. The "disjointed" history of the condominium, the rivalties opposing the various Christian missions which shared the archipelago and also the persistence of a traditional culture accepting with difficulty the centralised vision of space which is that of the modern states, have made, and still make, unity of the young state difficult.
Vanuatu is looking for its cultural identity : will the synthesis between traditional culture and modernity be possible? Will present tensions and conflicts give birth to a new fecundity?
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