This is a great, lucid introduction to the semiotic interpretation of culture. I always liked the idea of studying behavior, language, and objects as reflections of our collective values, but the theorists that I was trying to read (Foucault, Saussure, most of their followers) were too damn hard to understand. This might have had something to do w/ the fact that they had to be translated from other languages. Regardless, Hall mixes history, theory, and specific examples of applied semiotics in a way that makes it easy to understand and easy to see the worth of looking at the world in this way.