Beautiful Mystery 2025

The words "beautiful mystery" are in white against a pixelated, rainbow background. The outline of a child's face is faintly visible in the colors.

April 4, 2025
University of Southern California

Danilyn Rutherford (Wenner-Gren)

The Ethnography Studio and the USC Department of Anthropology had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Danilyn Rutherford, President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, for a conversation on April 4th.

We commented on some excerpts that Danilyn shared from her forthcoming book Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World (Duke University Press, 2025). How are we impacted, as ethnographers, by our own conditions of existence and academic production? How does life condition thought and thought condition life? Are we observing all the semiotic communities that inhabit these worlds? This conversation invited us to be more attentive to the specificity of the co-presence relationships that we are part of.

Someone smiles while speaking from the head of a conference table. An open laptop belonging to an unseen audience member is in the foreground.

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.

The cover of Danilyn Rutherford's book. The words "beautiful mystery: living in a wordless world" are in white against a pixelated, rainbow background. The outline of a child's face is faintly visible in the colors.