Babel's ethnography of language use in a small town in Bolivia (Saipina) combines neostructuralism and recent approaches to social meaning in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics to provide a beautiful and rigorous description of how choices in linguistic form are woven into the semiotic fabric of social practice. Similar to the research in linguistic anthropology in neo-Whorfianism, Babel extends and reworks the ideas of structuralism to show how social oppositions are recruited by speakers to move in a social world in which the Highland/Lowland opposition participates in a ‘semiotic alignment’ with other social valences such as political affiliation, ‘localness’, and indigeneity, as well as practices such as styles of dress.

Babel introduces the work using the question ‘Why can't a Quechua speaker wear pants?’. This question highlights the way that language is interwoven with social categories and other social practices in Saipina. The following two chapters begin to introduce the oppositions she elaborates in ethnographic details throughout the book, along with the theoretical semiotic background relying on theories of indexicality. She then provides short sketches of individuals and how their language and other social practices fit into this system. The following six main chapters explore in detail different aspects of the semiotic system and how they are used by residents of Saipina: language use, localness and migration, politics, tradition vs. modernity, the differences in how the semiotic alignments play out by gender, and the status of Saipineños who migrate to the ‘big city’, Santa Cruz. The conclusion returns to theoretical issues of indexicality and semiotic alignment, reviewing the oppositions of the previous chapters and how they articulate with the various practices she has vividly described. What emerges is a lovely portrait of a community and how language is part of its social fabric, demonstrating not only that language and the social are inseparable, but also how they interact. As Babel notes, some linguists may find some stretches of more socially focused description lacking in linguistics, but ultimately these descriptions are crucial for understanding the meanings of linguistic choices in Saipina.

One of the more innovative and fulfilling aspects of the book are the short, two- to three-page ‘Interludes’ that are placed between each chapter. These interludes situate Babel personally into the ethnography, allowing her to tell more personally the ways she interacted with Saipineños, including her first arrival, some of the people she came to know, and ultimately her status as the spouse of a native of the town. The stories and sketches she provides in these interludes flesh out and provide an important third dimension to her analysis, and they complete the book's almost perfect balance between ethnographic detail and theoretical analysis.