Ursula K. Le Guin: Always Coming Home (Loa #315): Author's Expanded Edition: 4 (Library of America Ursula K. Le Guin Edition)

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Forbidden Love: Relationships between people in any one of the Five Houses are taboo and treated as incest, even absent any familial connection. Le Guin describes this by analogy to moiety kinship systems in various real-life cultures. Crafting the Hinge in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home” by Sandra J. Lindow, The New York Review of Science Fiction (2 April 2022) Utopia: Discussed, especially in the Framing Device when Pandora talks with a Kesh woman and complains about how "utopians" are a bother. The Kesh are at least partially In Harmony with Nature, wealth is determined by generosity, homophobia and sexism are minimized, and there is no need for police or an army, but there's also superstition, violence, and cruelty.

Virginity Flag: As a variant, taking on a sexual partner is the stage where a person starts wearing dyed clothing. Mary Catherine Harper, "Spiraling Around the Hinge-Working Solutions in Always Coming Home" in Old West-New West: Centennial Essays, edited by Barbara Howard Meldrum, University of Idaho Press, 1993, pp. 241-57.

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Always Coming Home was germinated in 1983 when Ursula’s husband Charles took sabbatical from teaching. This enabled the couple to settle for some months at her family ranch “Kishamish”, in the Napa Valley. She had spent the summers of her childhood there, with her brother Karl and parents Alfred Louis and Theodora Kroeber, both anthropologists. As a child, two Native American friends of her father’s, also spent time with the family at “Kishamish”. Exposed to Native American Indian culture from a young age, thanks to her father’s friendship with Juan Dolores, a Papago, and Robert Spott, a Yurok, Ursula was well aware of California’s history and the depth and richness of its autochthonous cultures. Good Girls Avoid Abortion: The Dayao nobles would never consider an abortion, but the commoners are stated to have them more often than not. Definitely averted for the Kesh people, who are a complete pro-choice society (except for girls younger than eighteen, who are never allowed to become mothers). Stone Telling mentions having an abortion after a case of Marital Rape License by her Dayao husband. Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton. “A River Song”. Music and Poetry of the Kesh. Freedom to Spend, 2019.

I never did like smart-ass utopians’—On Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin” by Mazin Saleem, Strange Horizons (26 November 2018) Proud Warrior Race Guy: The Dayao are that. Causes Terter Abhao a lot of trouble with Willow, for whom all his achievements and heroics are meaningless or childish. Meaningful Rename: People in the Valley tend to have three names throughout their lives; as children, as adults and as old people. The mother of Stone Telling was Willow as an adult, and once she broke up with Terter, demanded to be called by her childhood name, Towhee. It was considered an extremely wrong action which her daughter never accepted, and upon her death, she was mourned as Ashes. Stone Telling herself also had a fourth (or rather, second) name while living among the Dayao. The book is mostly centered around the Kesh People who live in nine towns in the Valley of River Na, what we nowadays know as the Napa County, California, near Mount Saint Helena (a sacred location to them). They are a simple, utopian society with low population, technology limited to the level they can maintain comfortably, and no government in the sense we know it.Schizo Tech: The Kesh have electricity and solar panels, a single steam train (pulled by horses when the weather is too dry to risk the engine starting a fire), internet access via what are described as foldable high-resolution electric ink displays, and yet a lot of their technology and culture are at the level of pre-Columbian natives.

Erlich, Richard D. (1997). "Always Coming Home". Coyote's Song: The Teaching Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin. The Milford Series Popular Writers of Today. Wildside Press. p.247. ISBN 978-1-4344-5775-2. ISSN 0163-2469. Archived from the original on 2012-03-18 . Retrieved 2013-02-20.

So these things human beings had done to the world must have been deliberate and conscious acts of evil, serving the purposes of wrong understanding, fear, and greed. The people who had done these things had done wrong mindfully. They had had their heads on wrong." Bigger Is Better in Bed: One humorous story has a girl impressed when she sees a particular guy peeing.