Join Danilyn Rutherford for a reading from her new book, Beautiful Mystery, followed by a discussion with Rachel Adams on disability and difference, life writing and scholarship, and the complexities of interdependency and care.

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.

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. Writing 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.

Speakers

Danilyn Rutherford is President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. 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.

Rachel Adams is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author, most recently, of Love, Money, Duty: Stories of Care in Our Time.

The organizers of this talk are committed to accessibility and inclusivity. If you require disability accommodations, please contact [email protected] by Monday, Oct 27.