Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place is the fascinating story of an urban neighborhood undergoing rapid gentrification. It is a story about how the members of a multi-ethnic, multi-class Washington, D.C., community deploy language to project conflicting images of their neighborhood. Waging wars around such issues as public toilets and public urination, the "morality" of co-ops & condos, and characterizations of "good" girls and "bad" boys, community members use these themes to create identities for themselves as legitimate community members (e.g., as tough urbanites or sophisticated historic preservationists) while creating identities to discredit others (e.g., "People who belong in the suburbs"). Turf Wars taps the power of discourse analysis to provide insight into the ways that local activity shapes larger urban social processes.
In this innovative text, cultural anthropologist and linguist Gabriella Modan offers a detailed, rich, and highly engrossing ethnographic account of a neighborhood and the people who live and work there. She also provides readers with little background in linguistic anthropology, cultural geography, and urban anthropology a primer to key concepts and presents a range of sophisticated ideas in an accessible manner.