The City at Its Limits: Taboo, Transgression, and Urban Renewal in Lima

by Daniella Gandolfo

Overview

In 1996, against the backdrop of Alberto Fujimori’s increasingly corrupt national politics, an older woman in Lima, Peru—part of a group of women street sweepers protesting the privatization of the city’s cleaning services—stripped to the waist in full view of the crowd that surrounded her. Lima had just launched a campaign to revitalize its historic districts, and this shockingly transgressive act was just one of a series of events that challenged the norms of order, cleanliness, and beauty that the renewal effort promoted. The City at Its Limits employs a novel and fluid interweaving of essays and field diary entries as Daniella Gandolfo analyzes the ramifications of this act within the city’s conflicted history and across its class divisions. She builds on the work of Georges Bataille to explore the relation between taboo and transgression, while Peruvian novelist and anthropologist José María Arguedas’s writings inspire her to reflect on her return to her native city in movingly intimate detail. With its multiple perspectives—personal, sociological, historical, and theoretical—The City at Its Limits is a pioneering work on the cutting edge of ethnography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226280974
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	07/15/2009
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Daniella Gandolfo is professor of anthropology and Latin American studies at Wesleyan University. She is the author of The City at Its Limits: Taboo, Transgression, and Urban Renewal in Lima, also published by the Press.

Table of Contents

Preface

1 Introduction: Taboo

2 First Diary

3 Beauty

4 Second Diary

5 Filth

6 Third Diary

7 Nakedness

8 Last Entry

   NotesBibliography

  Acknowledgements   Illustration Credits

  Index

Editorial Reviews

This is a brilliant, beautifully and powerfully written book and a much-needed intervention into academic thought about the senses, affect, intensity, place, the city, and politics—I found it entirely convincing.

Kathleen Stewart

This beautifully written ethnography carries us along the distinctive memory traces left by the diary, the fieldnote, and the archive to explore the boisterous street life, personal memories, and violent intimacies of political and social life in Lima. By bringing anthropological theories of transgression and taboo to bear on modern public and political life, Gandolfo gives us new insights into the workings of affect, place, and political performance, and she does so with a feel for language that sets a new standard for ethnographic writing.

Deborah Poole