Disseminare il centro. Artefatti otomì tra esposizione e disgregazione

The Otomi of the Sierra Madre Orientale organize their ritual actions around the construction of ceremonial deposits (also named offerings) set up in oratories, private or communal, or in the landscape itself. Such deposits represent the core of the ritual act: the nerve centre in which the gesture turns into effective action on the world. A plural, mobile centre scattered in space and in a long temporality. This article aims to rethink the logic expressed by the centre/periphery pair by highlighting its inadequacy in accounting for indigenous notions of spatiality and temporality. Beginning with the Otomi case and the native conception of artefacts as living beings, it then analyses the processes of constituting ethnographic collections: a movement that proceeds from the source communities toward the museum as the central, and authoritative, institution of staging Otherness.