Books in the New Directions in Ethnography series

Part historic ethnography, part linguistic case study and part a mother s memoir, Kisisi tells the story of two boys (Colin and Sadiki) who, together invented their own language, and of the friendship they shared in postcolonial Kenya.

Transcultural Teens provides readers with a window onto the cultural and linguistic creativity of the housing projects, or cite s, that ring Paris, showing how young people of Algerian Arab origins play with language in fascinating ways that subvert commonly held notions of intercultural animosity.

A rich and engrossing account of 'sexual outlaws' in the Hausa-speaking region of northern Nigeria under Shari'a law, this text provides the first ethnographic study of sexual minorities in Africa, and one of very few works on sexual minorities in the Islamic world.

In this ground-breaking new book on the Nortena and Surena (North/South) youth gang dynamic, cultural anthropologist and linguist Norma Mendoza-Denton looks at the daily lives of young Latinas and their innovative use of speech, bodily practices, and symbolic exchanges that signal their gang affiliations and ideologies.

Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place is the fascinating story of an urban neighborhood undergoing rapid gentrification. * Explores how members of a multi-ethnic, multi-class Washington, DC, community deploy language to legitimize themselves as community members while discrediting others.

Jackson traces the lively skirmishes between Madagascar s political cartoonists and politicians whose cartooning and public oratory reveal an ever-shifting barometer of democracy in the island nation.