Earthbound Wisdom, Earthbound Worlding: Always Coming Home in the Chthulucene

Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985) is a speculative ethnography of the Kesh, a place-bound, multispecies community whose ceremonial life, ecology, and non-linear temporality enact what this paper calls "earthbound wisdom." Drawing on Le Guin's lifelong engagement with the Tao Te Ching (Le Guin's preferred transliteration), the book performs what Donna Haraway calls an autremondialisation, a bringing of other liveable worlds into existence. This paper uses Haraway’s string figuring method to pass threads between several key thinkers (Deborah Bird Rose, Bruno Latour, James Clifford, and Kim Stanley Robinson), asking what wisdom the Kesh might offer to those Latour calls the Earthbound, those gathered in response to an Earth that is acting now. Rather than advocating for a new religion, the paper concludes by wrestling with the inherited categories of religion and the secular themselves, asking how they might be refigured in the Chthulucene.