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.
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Joël Bonnemaison (1981) studied this question.