Introduzione a un'antropologia dei centri

(Introduction to an Anthropology of Centers)

Abstract

Distancing itself from major theoreticians of “centers” such as Mircea Eliade and Edward Shils, the essay advances a notion that is much less compromised with the principle of sacredness. It is a more humble and modest, plural and territorial notion. Through it, on the one hand it is possible to avoid conceiving centers as direct manifestations of the sacred and societies as fundamentally “mono-centric”; on the other, it is possible to consider centers as meaningful moments both in processes of more or less extreme sacralization and as subjected to a more or less definite and convinced desacralization.