Please join CU Boulder’s Department of Anthropology for

Beautiful Mystery:

Living in a Wordless World

A Reading and Conversation

with Danilyn Rutherford

December 12, 2025, 4-5:30pm

Hale Science 450 (1350 Pleasant St)

Free and open to the public

Contact Kathryn.Goldfarb@Colorado.edu with any questions

When Danilyn Rutherford and her husband Craig noticed that their six-month-old daughter Millie wasn’t making eye contact, none of her doctors could give Millie a diagnosis, but it was clear that her brain was not developing at the rate it should. 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.

Danilyn Rutherford is the president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.