Danilyn Rutherford - "Beautiful Mystery" - E. Summerson Carr

Danilyn Rutherford will discuss Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World. She will be joined in conversation by E. Summerson Carr. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. 

At the Co-op.

RSVP Here (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required)

About the Book

When Danilyn Rutherford and her husband Craig noticed that their six-month-old daughter Millie wasn’t making eye contact, they took her to their pediatrician. And an optometrist. Then a neurologist. Later, to a team of physical and occupational therapists. None of the doctors could give Millie a diagnosis, but it was clear that her brain was not developing at the rate it should. At an age when some children take their first steps, Millie had the cognitive ability and motor skills of a three-month-old. Three years later, Craig died suddenly of a heart attack and Danilyn found herself on the precipice of her anthropology career as a widow and single mother, still trying to solve the puzzle posed by Millie’s inaccessible mind.

Now in her twenties, Millie has never been able to express herself verbally, but she has a thriving social environment rooted in the people around her and in things her companions and family can see, hear, smell, and feel. Life in Millie’s world is far richer than might be immediately evident to those who think and communicate in conventional ways.

Beautiful Mystery explores what it means to be a person in the spaces between what we can and cannot say, and how we can fight to care for those we love when they don’t have the language to fight for themselves. Through her unique lens as a mother and an anthropologist, Rutherford tells the story of arriving in Millie’s world, what she found there, and how Millie showed her that words aren’t always what makes us human. Enlightening and deeply felt, Beautiful Mystery proves that you don’t have to understand someone to love them—a lesson that, if we all learned it, might allow us to live together in a fractured world.

About the Author

Danilyn Rutherford is President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. An award-winning anthropologist, she has previously taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Chicago. She is the author of Living in the Stone Age: Reflections on the Origins of a Colonial Fantasy, Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua, and Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier. Rutherford lives in Santa Cruz, California.

About the Interlocutor

E. Summerson Carr is Professor at the University of Chicago, jointly appointed in the Anthropology Department and the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice. Her ethnographic work explores the ways that expertise is enacted, institutionalized and scaled, especially in professions that focus on human behavior and interiority. Her most recent book is titled, Working the Difference: Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing (UChicago Press, 2023). Her current research traces how dogs are being recruited, trained, and deployed as full-time human service workers, exploring why and to what effects dogs are valorized for extra-human capacities to communicate and care in such settings.