Since beginning to do graduate fieldwork in Lima, her native city, Daniella Gandolfo has been drawn to forms of sacred experience in everyday life. Whether through taboo and transgression, risk-taking and loss, or animal and self-sacrifice, her work examines the various forms of excess generated in events and actions at the limit of reasonableness and human sociality. She has written about transgression and politics in the context of urban renewal; urban policy and the underclasses; risk, waste, and sovereign power in extra-legal markets; and the role of animality in social life and ritual.

Selected publications:

“Lumpen Politics: A Day in The Pit,” forthcoming in Comparative Studies in Society and History.

“Investigations of a Guinea Pig.” Social Text 35: 3 (132), 2017.

“Conversations with a Hunter.” Pandian, Anand and Stuart McLean (Eds.), Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017.

“El alcalde y la barrendera: Georges Bataille, transgresión, y política en Lima.” In Drinot, Paulo (Ed.), El Perú en teoría. Lima: Fondo Editorial del Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2017.

“The Street Sweeper and the Mayor: George Bataille, Transgression, and Politics in Lima.” In Drinot, Paulo (Ed.), Peru in Theory. London: Palgrave, 2014.

“Formless: A Day at Lima’s Office of Formalization.” Cultural Anthropology 28: 2, 2013.

The City at its Limits: Taboo, Transgression, and Urban Renewal in Lima. Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 2009.