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Before the sixties, the French government did not show any interest in promoting sports in the French West Indies. In fact, sports were firstly promoted by a small native group. Who are they? Which qualities do they look for and find in sports? Which benefits—whether social or symbolic—do they draw from them? This paper presents the relation between the belief in the virtues of sport and the search for identity. Thus, our goal is to examine the importance of the "sporting spirit" in the assimilation process, in relation to the metropolis. The desire to be recognized, the wish to prove an equality, the need to belong to a community—even if it is far away, from a geographic and cultural point of view—are at the heart of a quest, evident in first part of the XX century in Guadeloupe and Martinique. This work is mainly based on the analysis of sports magazines and newspapers articles, as well as biographic approach, in order to outline the sportsman's profile. The ambition in drawing some common characteristics of sport development in the French West Indies, is also to allow a comparative study with other Caribbean countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If we consider identity, relations to space and religion as well as the connections between these three things, it is clear that a stable centre serving as a trusted point of reference for everyone has disappeared. This realization is supported by the reiterations of this centre that are brought about precisely by its inability to inspire trust. The problem is no longer to draw maps in space of some lower-level sets organized around a central point of reference, which appears to be absolute, as an arrangement that would be likely to lend substance to their insular character. In these subsets, reference to centrality and construction of homogeneity used to be joined together in order to mark the boundaries where territoriality and identity coincided. Although identity still partially overlaps with territory, it is no longer subsumed by it and is therefore no longer exhausted in the fiction of a coincidence. This is the perspective from which the author explores three hypotheses about religion as space, resource and language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]