Based on extensive fieldwork in Saipina, a municipality located mid-point between the Cochabamba valleys and the eastern lowlands of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, this sociolinguistic ethnography explores the meanings of language use in its connections with other semiotic systems, bringing out the sociocultural and political polarisations between highland and lowland populations. The hybrid linguistic practices of saipineños, at the interface between Quechua and Spanish, are shown to reveal dynamic attempts to resolve the polarisations and coalesce a particular saipineño cultural identity.

The book's analytical framework is based on principles of semiosis that posit the articulation of binary oppositions informing Saipina people's construction of a sense of identity. These oppositions, as the author demonstrates, are constantly under negotiation in social and linguistic practice. The semiotic approach draws on theories of indexicality and iconicity, inspired by Charles Sanders Peirce (‘Logic as Semiotic’ (1897–1910), in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler, Courier Corporation, 1955) and as applied in sociolinguistics by Judith Irvine and Susan Gal (‘Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation’, in P. V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, School of American Research Press, 2000, pp. 35–83) and Penelope Eckert (‘Variation and the Indexical Field’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12: 4 (2008), pp. 453–76). It allows the author to explain the correlations between linguistic and other signs (e.g. clothing styles, political allegiances, gastronomic culture), and show how these semiotic linkages are embedded in and contribute to the shaping of social structure.

The social geography of Saipina is characterised by a set of oppositions, most notably that of a highland (or colla) identity with its Andean roots including Quechua language, and a lowland (camba) positioning which aligns with a Spanish-speaking sector. The fact that the author conducted the greater part of her field research in 2008, when the stand-off between the highland (tierras altas) political class and that of the eastern lowlands (medialuna) was at its height, brings the oppositions into sharp focus. The discussion centrally explores the way tensions are enacted in language use, including language contact features, with both Spanish influence in the speech of Quechua-dominant saipineños and Quechua influence in the speech of those who are Spanish-dominant.

The book is organised into chapters that each present an aspect of the theme of language use and social meaning ‘between the Andes and the Amazon’, interlaced with a series of ‘Interludes’ that comprise more personal, reflective and ethnographic vignettes of the author's experience of living and researching in Saipina. The Interludes successfully ground the analytical discussion contained in the substantive chapters.

The study emerges from the discipline of linguistic anthropology, with a tradition that ‘connects large-scale social structures to the details of language use and the ways that people understand language’ (p. 228). To analyse this connection in the case of language and social meaning in Saipina, the author develops the concept of ‘semiotic field’, defined as ‘a complex geography of social signification that encompasses not just language but also styles of dress, political stances, gender expression, migration and residence patterns, and even emotions and affective stances’ (p. 53).

The ways in which language practice constructs social categorisation are covered in both Chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 shows how contrasting sociophonetic features of Spanish pronunciation, as well as variable use of Quechua loan words, locate speakers in the colla or camba camp and enable saipineños to articulate their own in-between identity through their particular way of speaking. The author provides a window onto large-scale social structure through her fine-grained analyses of the speech of people occupying, or perceived as occupying, differential positions within that structure.

Chapter 3 provides a useful account of Quechua–Spanish distribution and contact in the history of this lesser-studied region of Bolivia (pp. 88–91), although I would rephrase the statement that ‘Quechua is a linguistic isolate’ (p. 89). The author again makes effective use of discourse analysis, showing how features of language contact operate as social indices in saipineño speech. The ideologised nature of the ‘semiotic field’ is made apparent in her observations regarding how speakers themselves perceive language contact features. Crucially, she shows how ‘being a Spanish speaker and being a Quechua speaker were identity categories, not descriptions of linguistic ability’ (p. 87). Thus, according to the position of the interlocutor along this imagined divide, contact features of Quechua in Spanish could be seen either as ‘mistakes’ (where the speaker was Quechua-dominant and perceived as a colla with origins outside of Saipina) or as rhetorical ‘strategies’ when the speaker was Spanish-dominant and seen as a Saipina insider (p. 52).

Chapters 4 to 8 explore ways in which social meaning is semiotically constructed around a range of binary oppositions, with focus on: perceptions of insider–outsider status articulated with notions of legitimacy and authenticity from the Saipina point of view (Ch. 4); local articulations of national political allegiances that oppose the ‘blue’ supporters of the Movimiento al Socialismo to the ‘greens’ associated with Santa Cruz-based groupings (Ch. 5); the competition between tradition (as locally conceived in Saipina valley identity) and modernity (Ch. 6); genderised expressions of social structure, including an effective discussion of the cholita–señorita contrast and the role of the pollera (peasant skirt) (Ch. 7); and the effects of urban migration on cultural positioning, particularly among youth and with particular reference to shifts in moral codes (Ch. 8). Regarding Ch. 7, it needs to be noted that the discussion of the cholita category and its connection with the pollera is only a partial representation of a reality in which Aymara-speaking women of the Bolivian highlands are also a crucial component. To include them in this analysis would alter the shape of the semiotic field.

In a more extended study, preceding scholarship on Quechua–Spanish bilingualism in the Andes could have been further acknowledged, for example work by Penelope Harvey and Juan Carlos Godenzzi for southern Peru and Xavier Albó and Inge Sichra for Bolivia; a more thorough comparative engagement with Jane and Kenneth Hill's work on the Nahuatl–Spanish ‘syncretic project’ would also be in order.

In this book, the author skilfully reveals the social structural nuances underpinning Quechua–Spanish bilingual language habits in a part of the Andes that is neither quite Andes nor quite Amazonia. From the perspective of Andeanist ethnography and linguistic anthropology alike, the book provides a refreshingly new perspective.