"The City at Its Limits: Taboo, Transgression, and Urban Renewal in Lima, Peru" by Daniella M. Gandolfo

Daniella M. Gandolfo

Deposited 2006

Abstract
The City at its Limits zeroes in on a campaign of urban revitalization of Lima's "historic center" (1996-2002) and on the social and racial tensions it kindled to examine the role of taboo and transgression in our perceptions of social difference, especially as these relate to class, sex, and race. The efforts to revitalize the city center, as well as the rhetoric framing those efforts, are juxtaposed with events, including transgressive forms of political action that challenged the naturalized norms of order, cleanliness, and beauty put forth by the renewal campaign. Three events make up the backbone of the narrative: The protests of a group of laid-off street sweepers who demonstrated against city policy by stripping naked and hurling animal refuse in the streets; the struggles of a man to lay to rest the body of his brother as he finds himself caught in an web of corruption; and the experiences of estrangement that marked my return to Lima, the city where I was born, which at once produced a renewed awareness of its conflicted history and precluded my complete re-familiarization.

The narrative is developed in chapters written alternatively as field diaries and as essays, threaded by theoretical reflections on taboo and transgression. Central to these reflections is Georges Bataille's notion that an idea of a "proper humanity" stems from social prohibitions (taboos) that human beings and societies enforce, but cannot avoid transgressing, as a way of imposing their distance from animality. The diaries aim to recreate the momentous but ephemeral quality of taboo, which exists only at and for the instant a particular limit is crossed; the essays affirm, by contrast, the immediacy of this reality by pointing to the sovereignty of transgression and the impossibility of its representation.