Danilyn Rutherford | Beautiful Mystery: Life and Ethnography in a Wordless World

Danilyn Rutherford will introduce her forthcoming book, which explores what it means to be a person by way of her experiences with her daughter and others like her who neither talk nor use conventional signs. Blending memoir and ethnography, the book’s focus isn’t cognitive disability, it’s cognitive mystery: the puzzle posed by an inaccessible mind. You don’t have to understand someone to connect with them. If we can grasp this truth, we might just learn to live together and somehow go on.

About the Author

Danilyn Rutherford is president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. She is the author of Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier (Princeton, 2003), Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua (Chicago, 2012) and Living in the Stone Age: The Origins of a Colonial Fantasy (Chicago, 2018). Her fourth book, Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in fall 2025.