Steerswomen, Embodied Knowledge & Epistemologies of Usefulness

Posted: 2026-02-09 | Categories: essays | Tags: Always Coming Home, dao, epistemology, knowledge, literature, philosophy, sci-fi, Steerswoman

I write think a lot about speculative fiction and how we might be able to imagine a future together, especially in the difficult times we are in right now. I’ve been working on a larger essay that goes more into detail about the political (anarchist) response to societal collapse that incorporates a lot of different frameworks, but today I want to spend some time talking about some of my new favorite books.

My music recommendation for today is Only Dust Remain by Backxwash

In my sleepless nights (of which I have a lot) I have been powering through Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series. I think they’re criminally under read for reasons I can’t ascertain. For those of you not familiar with the novels (pleeease go read them, pleeeease) they center on a steerswoman named Rowan in what at first seems to be a rather standard medieval fantasy world, but quickly unfolds into something a lot more strange that I don’t want to spoil, because figuring out those puzzles is half the fun of these books. In fact, I will eschew spoilers in this little essay completely. Instead, I want to focus on the concept of the steerswomen, what they do, how they work, and why they may offer a path forward and out of usual conceptions of scholarship and academia, especially in a world of increasing institutional rigidity, abstraction, and collapse.

First of all, what is a steerswoman? In the world of the novels, steerswomen (and some few men) are a order of nomadic scholars who travel the world in order to collect, assemble, and disseminate information. They do this under one primary principle: A steerswoman must answer any question posited to her as truthfully as possible. In turn, the cultural convention holds that if a question is posited to you by a steerswoman, you must also respond with the truth. If you lie to a steerswoman or refuse to answer her questions you are placed under ban and no member of the order will answer another question you might pose them. This doesn’t necessarily exclude other conversation or information freely given, but it does count for all questions posed in conversation, essentially locking you out of the collected knowledge of all steerswomen for refusing to uphold the freedom of information.

The steerswomen creed ensures not only that knowledge can continue to be gathered and used, it also has an added function of fostering those same ideals in other people. Not only must you consider your questions, but you are also prompted to formulate answers.

What makes steerswomen different from other fictional representations or ideals of scholars and academics is the staunch refusal to place them in any ivory tower. Their records are open to the public and their work never occurs apart from the world or the people that inhabit it. After 4 years of training steerswomen are expected to begin their travels and their record keeping in a logbook. This logbook is a systematic account of anything and everything interesting, new, and unknown that the steerswoman may encounter. These travels may last well into old age, with steerswomen only rarely becoming sedentary and only settling down into tasks of archival work and/or more abstract scholarship when they have reached an age too old for travel or become disabled throughout their journeys. They are still respected as complete members of the order and it is seen more as an opportunity to change one’s tack and focus on other topics after an often long time on the road.

Steerswomen fulfill a useful role in society by being able to help people of other professions piece together new elements of their world. In return, steerswomen enjoy general goodwill amongst people, are frequently supported in their travels for services rendered, and play an active part in the communities they either pass through or settle down in. Knowledge in these books is not treated as a good to be hoarded, it isn’t even treated as a thing exclusive to steerswomen. The depiction of knowledge is one that is ubiquitous across all peoples and classes. Everyone knows something and everyone knows different things and has different skills and talents. It is the steerswoman’s calling to learn and collate as much of this disparate information as possible in order to answer larger questions about the workings of the world through the application of “reason, precision, and patience”. This production of knowledge happens not in order to control the nature of the world, but to enable humans to better align their own affairs with the movements and (seemingly) unpredictable whims of nature.

Coming from a tradition of seafarers and cartographers, one of the steerswomen’s traditional functions is to help locals update the maps and charts of their immediate surroundings. Updating charts, carrying news and information, helping out around the various sectors of the town and being in contact and conversation with the general populace are all a part of the work. In the climax of the second book The Outskirter’s Secret, our characters accompany a nomadic steppe tribe in a gruelling 72 hour march away from danger. The method of navigation used throughout this scene is perhaps one of the most striking images in the book.

Throughout the day, reports were received from the warriors ahead, the doubled inner and outer circles, the augmented, distant scouts. They held more information, and more precise, than was usual; and by afternoon Rowan realized that the reports had evolved to such a degree of precision that they were now expressed in meters, with every rock and rill and gully described and located exactly among all other features. Rowan began to wonder at the necessity of this; but even as she wondered, her trained instincts began unconsciously to use the information, constructing for her a mental map of her surroundings. It consisted of a kilometer-wide band, extending ahead to a distance of fifty kilometers, the location of the farthest scout. The map shifted as the tribe moved, coming into existence with the report of the point scout, amended and expanded by the warriors that followed. As the map grew clearer in her mind, Rowan became more interested, and then fascinated, staring blindly ahead. The map was like a living thing, moving, even breathing, in waves of information. With knowledge of this detail, she felt she could walk the veldt blindfolded. She emerged from her absorption to see Kammeryn beside her. He walked confidently in his usual measured pace, but his eyes looked only inward. Rowan realized that he was doing the same as she had been, but doing so completely, with all his attention and concentration. It came to Rowan that the information, and its detail, were of desperate importance.

Especially this passage is illustrative of how knowledge shapes our perception and world, with the scout information providing almost a type of Umwelt for the tribe of 30 people to navigate by. It understands information not for its own sake, but for its usefulness, while also understanding it as a living, breathing thing constantly in flux.

We can see here as well: steerswomen’s knowledge is always collaborative and while many of the pieces must be fitted together through the methods of logic and reasoning that steerswomen are trained in in order to create more useful understanding of the world, how that information is gained and used always happens in concert with others and the results are public and immediate. I think if the steerswomen had a named method of citation, it would be Deborah Khondanovich’s Relational Citation System that tries to show the communal aspects of knowledge production academia frequently glosses or squabbles over.

In his reappraisal of Ursula Le Guin’s career post Always Coming Home, Brian Atteberry comments on collaborative efforts in the arts that I think can be applied to any form of work:

Collaboration confounds standard critical models. […] Like 1940s film critics, we want heroic auteurs rather than teams of writers, directors, and cinematographers, even if we have to invent those auteurs. We want authors, auctors, and authorizers to tell us how to feel and how to organize our lives along narrative lines. One of the lasting lessons of postmodernism is that texts are always multiple, contradictory, and, yes, collaborative. Language is social, and so are the arts that employ it, no matter how much we want to turn writers into solitary colossi or demidivinities. Stories build on stories. The resonance we value in great literature is partly the artful echo of other literature. ¹

Just as stories build on other stories, knowledge builds on pre-existing knowledge. This is a fact that is already quite clear to many scientists and academics, but it is often only knowledge that has been subject to the same crucibles and frameworks of knowing that the academy allows, as opposed to the “on the ground” collaboration of steerswomen and the people they meet.

It is not a purely cerebral job. Steerswomen’s knowledge is gained primarily through first hand accounts and personal experience. The approach to the world is one of curiosity and experience as knowledge. This form of embodied knowledge is quite different from the highly standardized factories of knowledge production for knowledge production’s or industrial sake that we find in modern day academia.

In The Language of Power Rowan chides the rouge wizard’s apprentice Will about his lack of practical knowledge when it comes to dragons, even though he had previously led the expedition due to his seemingly superior knowledge. This knowledge was useful, but mainly theoretical and lacks the embodied knowledge Rowan brings to the table, a fact that the man schooled in the secretive, knowledge hoarding skills of the wizard was not aware of.

The contrasting philosophy to the radical freedom of information doctrine of the Steerswomen are the wizards. These are powerful men and women who have vast energies at their disposal and use their secret knowledge to create devices and spells that defy human comprehension. They keep their knowledge about these matters closely guarded, and use their skills mainly to exert dominance and control over the population of the inner lands. Due to their power and secret knowledge, most wizards are under ban of the steerswomen. This holds little consequence for them, as their magic is often powerful enough and their knowledge wide enough to not require the services of a steerswoman. Their knowledge however, is distant, controlling, and largely theoretical, working and being applied in secret and to coerce and control, the opposite of the embodied, open knowledge benefiting all that the steerswomen represent. I come back to this topic again and again, but it is relevant here too: This is a matter of abstractions². Steerswomen and Wizards represent two modes of epistemology. That of the steerswomen which is not only as direct as possible (in the course of her studies, Rowan routinely gets her hands dirty. Figuratively and literally), but also creates knowledge that allows a direct and non-controlling interaction with the world. The wizards represent an epistemology and understanding of technology that is a lot closer to the dominant mode of our society. Their knowledge is cold, distant, and removed from the world so that they may better learn to control it with a disregard for the consequences of their actions. Will describes the prevailing attitudes of wizards around magic in a way that clearly and intentionally echoes our attitudes toward technology:

“[The wizards and those in their courts] take magic for granted. Some spells are always there, always operating, and people just call on them without thinking about it. But usually they don’t know a thing about how the spells really work […] and because it’s all so familiar, when they do start to learn, they have to unlearn things first, and throw off old attitudes.”

By pitting these two methods of knowledge against each other, and by casting our mode of knowledge as the villain the novels try to suggest an alternate approach towards information that may prove to be more sustainable, direct, and world-centered. But what exactly does this approach to knowledge and information entail?

In another installment of “Lea never shuts up about Always Coming Home”, the steerswoman profession reminds me strongly of the path outlined in Always Coming Home’s Initiation Song of the Finder’s Lodge:

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well-loved one,
walk mindfully, well-loved one,
walk fearlessly, well-loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

The Finder’s Lodge in Always Coming Home is a group responsible for exploration and trade outside of the book’s setting, the valley of the Na. Finder’s Lodge initiates tend to be the only people of the Kesh to venture very far out into the world, with most members of Kesh society being content to remain in the valley, as it provides all they need. An essential aspect of the Finder’s Lodge is their eventual return home. This return isn’t just a physical one, it is a reminder to return to the place from which one comes, to bring all new information back within oneself and integrate it into the self and the valley. If you are of the valley, after all, you carry the valley in you always. This vision of embodied knowledge and nomadic exploration for it’s own sake could also be seen as the spiritual counterpart to the steerswomen’s intellectual ideals. I don’t know if Mrs. Kirstein has read Always Coming Home, (although seeing the tradition in which she writes, I would be surprised if she hadn’t) so to postulate a explicit link between the two texts isn’t my intent. I merely think that these two worlds might have things to tell each other, and since I have enjoyed thinking with both of them immensely, I am happy to facilitate that conversation.

Always Coming Home is in many ways a daoist utopia. It is even reasonable to claim that the entire premise of Kesh society is based upon Chapter 80 of the Daodejing. The Daodejing as a whole, and especially this chapter, is often read as an anti-intellectual text, one that rejects wisdom and cleverness in favor of simplicity and stupidity. Cleverness, to Laozi, is the source of competition, control, and warfare. I’ve argued here that I disagree with this view of the text, and that I believe this reading is steeped in the same assumptions of linear progress and technological inevitability that permeate our culture. Instead, I propose that knowledge in the DDJ isn’t an abstract thing to be held onto and hoarded for the purposes of ruling with a particularly clever and devious plan. Knowledge is more like the Dao, clear, elusive, and blank like uncut wood. The way nature works is simply the way nature works. We can learn ever more intricacies and interactions about it, but even if we understand all the mechanisms, we will still not have answered why. So, the idea goes, when we come to know nature, we should let that knowledge become not just a series of facts, or a method to exert control over others and place ourselves outside the dance. We are dancing along with everything else and we embody that knowledge in the way we approach the world. Just as the butcher in the Zhang Zhou can intuitively carve up an animal, knowing precisely where the bones run together to such an exact degree that he must never sharpen his blade because he knows exactly where cutting is possible, so should our knowledge operate. As natural itself. I believe the steerswomen embody a lot of these ideas about immediacy and knowledge, using their faculties to understand the world through the world and immediately turning that information back over to the world.

To bring this all together, I think the steerswomen represent a potential (dare I say utopian) path forward for all those who value and thrive in the work of the researcher and the scholar, but who rightfully feel that the current state of academia mainly serves as a class filter that is subservient to the interests of the state and industry. The world is changing rapidly, our wizardly ways of knowing are destroying the planet and poisoning their own stores of knowledge. Our technologies are eating themselves and grow increasingly wasteful, less useful, and more expensive to access. When we think of a future that may be marred by the effects of climate catastrophe, war, and collapse it puts our concerns into a new perspective. Knowledge and Information will continue to be important in the future, and access to it will prove ever more valuable as we realize that much reliance on systems of instant retrieval and doubtless factuality is no longer given. I’ve advocated before for the “Society of Librarians”, where I implore people to rebuild local, offline stores of knowledge and create curatorial networks that can be fast and flexible to disseminate information amongst people. I think that the steerswomen fulfill a similar role, with the added benefit that they are also directly engaged in gathering new information about an ever changing world.

We are creatures of culture. Moreover, we are creatures of material culture. What that means to me is that that our cultural practices and how we think about ourselves in the world are inseparably tied to the things we put into and how we change this world, yet increasingly, we attempt to separate the cultural realm off from the realm of the material. Be it in our valuation of mind as being higher than the body, of the natural world we still and always will live in being destroyed in favor of constructing storage space for spaces where we can study, work, and spend our time apart from the world. The order of the steerswomen invite us to rethink academia and scholarship as a task that happens on the ground, with people and nature, in contact with how things actually interact in the gloriously messy system of the world. A similar organization here in the real world would encourage self organisation, mutual teaching, and open communication. It would try to enable curiosity where it can, and to create byways of information through people driven knowledge networks of trust to add redundancy to the information super highway. It would do away with the ivory tower and encourage individually driven research, wile at the same time placing researchers into the service and care of the people. In the vision of the future that sleeps somewhere deep in me, in that world that allows us to decide which parts of our lives we wish to subject to abstraction, in that world that exists somewhere outside of myths of progress and civilization, maybe scholars and steerswomen are closer to data carriers. Curators, source checkers, and researchers that go from town to town with the skill set that allows them to gauge the usefulness of information, that help people parse the slew of knowledge the old world left behind and find new, more useful ways of understanding the world together.

As someone struggling to find her place in the world stuck somewhere between academia, art in service of people, social work, and a healthy dosage of Weltschmerz, the potential that rests in the idea of the steerswomen is one that will not let me go. It imagines a world where the stratification of different fields is brought back together in service of coming into contact with the world, where knowledge does not die in the university halls, but is a byproduct of experience and exchange with the world outside of the institution. It’s a world that brings back together the body and the mind. It’s a future that we may come to need.

⚧𐂂 Mycelialisms

Steerswomen, Embodied Knowledge & Epistemologies of Usefulness

Further Reading