I think a lot of her books are about how many different ways of life and types of society and culture are possible, and this book is one of her best at bringing you in to another culture.
I also think in some important ways it is not as narratively strong as her best works, a necessary tradeoff for what it does accomplish. It's very interesting to consider her being raised by an anthropologist, and her exceptional childhood exposure to Ishi, whom her father had known and her mother and brother separately wrote books about.
A thread running through all of her books is a deep human interest in the ways of peoples, and how their stories about themselves shape who they are and their relationship to a changing world. Always Coming Home is the book of her that is most, almost exclusively, focused on these concerns.
For a shorter story (~50 pages), I'd highly recommend Paradises Lost by her. Many people have written stories about generation ships, but this one is absolutely stunning and truly marvelous.
Some 30 years after I read it, I still use "heya" as my default greeting.