Their year is marked off by elaborate seasonal dances. They do not share the West's present passion for origins and outcomes: their pivotal cultural concept is the hinge, the connecting principle that allows things both to hold together and to move in relation to each other. To be rich and to give are, for them, one verb. One noun serves them for both gift and wealth. But they live 500 years or more in our future, on the northwestern coast of what's left of a United States gone low-tech and depopulated by toxic wastes and radioac-tive contamination. The Kesh have access to a daunting computer system. When did the Kesh live? They haven't, yet. Le Guin has given us the imaginary companion volume of ''Readings'' that might accompany a formal anthropological study.

Though the word ''Indian'' does not appear from one end of the book to the other, the reader is likely to feel after only a few pages that much Native American culture has become a part of this dark, wise, stocky people's way of life. In addition there are poems, children's stories, adult folk tales, verse dramas, recipes, essays and a host of Kesh documents. Along with Marsh, Cowardly Dog and Mote, Wordriver is among the great novelists of the Kesh, the people of the Valley, the subjects of Mrs. The book contains a short novel,''Stone Telling,'' spaced out in three parts, narrated by a woman called Stone Telling and ''Chapter Two'' from another novel, ''Danger-ous People,'' by Wordriver. Margaret Chodos's fine line drawings portray animals, birds, sacred implements and symbols, tools, mountains and houses (but no people) and we have charts, maps, alphabets and a glossary. I would like to know, since each entry, with its song or poem, is a small story in itself. Are they by the composer, Todd Barton, or by Ursula Le Guin? It's not indicated. But even to glance at it is to suspect it's more than, or other than, that: the oversize trade paperback is boxed with a tape cassette of delicate songs, poems and haunting dance pieces, purportedly recorded on site.

Le Guin has created an entire ethnography of the far future in her new book.

Le Guin's most consistently lyric and luminous book in a career adorned with some of the most precise and passionate prose in the service of a major imaginative vision. WITH high invention and deep intelligence, ''Always Coming Home'' presents, in alternating narratives, poems and expositions, Ursula K. Illustrated by Margaret Chodos, With Music by Todd Barton.

Always coming home