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Gandolfo, Daniella
Assistant Professor of Anthropology Anthropology Department 860.685.3267 Anthropology 26 BA Pontifica Universidad Catolica Del Peru MA University of Texas Austin PHD Columbia University
EMAIL: dgandolfo@wesleyan.edu
Teaching/Publications Introductory courses in cultural anthropology, including courses dealing with issues of fieldwork method and the process of translating experience into writing; experimental ethnography as well as classic ethnography and the role of primitivism in the self-making of the West; urban anthropology, migration and urbanization; transgression and politics; middle class culture; the experience of the sacred in everyday life. Regional areas of interest: Latin America & the U.S. My book The City at its Limits: Taboo, Transgression and Urban Renewal in Lima, will be published by The University of Chicago Press in 2008. An article "The Street Sweeper and the Mayor" is under peer review at Cultural Anthropology.
WESLEYAN PO BOX: Anthropology Department
COURSES TAUGHT THIS SEMESTER:
RESEARCH INTERESTS: I began doing fieldwork in Lima, my native city, in 1996. Since then, I have been interested in the possibilities of doing an anthropology of "home," specifically in exploring the tension between intimacy and estrangement in looking at something familiar from up close. The question of how to write about one's home was central to Jose Maria Arguedas, a Peruvian anthropologist and novelist whose work is also of great interest to me. In several fieldwork visits to Lima between 1996 and 2002 my research focused on an campaign of urban renewal of the historic center, a cluster of colonial-era districts that were beautified and cleansed of ambulant vendors, street children, and prostitutes in order to restore them to their alleged past splendor. I examined the role of taboo and transgression in our perceptions of social difference by zeroing in on a couple of events that challenged the naturalized norms of order and beauty used by the city government: The protests of a group of laid-off street sweepers who demonstrated against city policy by stripping naked in the streets, and the struggles of a man to lay to rest the body of his brother as this was caught in what seemed to be a web of corruption looking to profit from the city's inefficient bureaucracy. The result of this work is my book The City at its Limits, which is slated for publication in the fall of 2008. I am presently working on a project that has expanded my interest in urban anthropology beyond Lima. It deals with twenty-first century urbanization in Peru by focusing on the Andean provincial capital of Puquio (Ayacucho), the first highland town ever linked to the coast by highway in the 1920s. An explosion in traffic turned Puquio into a bustling intersection of commercial and migratory flows. While today Puquio is still largely a rural town, it sustains itself on "informal" commerce and transport, typically urban economic strategies. I explore ways to write and theorize about this new kind of urban experience relying on Arguedas's ideas about language as an outgrowth of our relationship to the material world. After this project I hope to turn to the phenomenon of "informality" and examine how it is transposed, as a survival strategy, from Latin America to cities in the United States through migration. My focus will be "informal" weekend food vendors in the streets of Queens, New York. I also want to examine the use of the term "informality" through the notion of l'informe, which refers to formless things that resist classification.
OFFICE HOURS: On sabbatical/leave through 2009-10