I argue that Ursula K. Le Guin’s work is an early example of the postmodern “literary turn” in anthropology. I examine the specific ways Le Guin engages Boasian and New Critical theories of cultural and textual “wholes” to work both within and problematize those models. In The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Le Guin deploys many ethnographic conventions and the ideas of cultural and textual “wholeness” upon which they rely to make “meaning.” Le Guin however calls attention to these tropes as modes of storytelling that themselves are embedded in colonial power dynamics. Decentering conventional ethnographic epistemology, the text turns toward a multiperspectival, multigeneric storytelling that anticipates decolonial modes of writing deployed by Indigenous authors such as Leslie Marmon Silko. This experimentation reaches its fruition in Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985). Disrupting the allochronic trope of the “vanishing Indian” characteristic of both ethnography and science fiction, Le Guin imagines Indigenous futurity modeled in many ways on the “cultures” of Indigenous Californian peoples studied by her father Alfred Kroeber; she further disrupts the Boasians’ bounded, spatial concept of “culture,” constructing a fragmented decolonial anti-ethnography that challenges the ethnographer’s attempts to know, categorize, and contain an “Other” “culture.”