TERRITORY, CULTURE AND NATURE IN NATIONAL SYMBOLS: THE SPATIAL REPRESENTATION IN FLAGS

Abstract

Abstract The flag, together with the coat of arms and the national anthem are the three symbols through which an independent country proclaims your identity and sovereignty. In essence, they serve as “modern totems” – signs that bear a special relationship to the nations they represent, distinguishing them from one another and reaffirming their identity boundaries. They project cultural values associated to a political identity and the idea of belonging to a nationality, an imagined political community. In this article, I examine the flags among the present national symbols, where them show a great variety of significances that embrace the nature, the territory and the culture as references of the symbolic geographical spaces associated to each country around the world. I argue that flags demonstrate wide possibilities of interpretation in the scientific field, requesting larger studies that can narrow the relationships between the “geography and symbolic representations” as a new perspective of the analysis and decode the cultural ways of spatial representation. Key-Words: National Symbols, Nature, Territory, Culture.