Beautiful Mystery

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.

• Prologue viiWorlds Without Words 11. Leaving the Ground 11What to Expect 13Diagnosis 21Early Intervention 31What Millie Remembers 47No Future 55II. The Lessons 69Proximity to Disability 71The Sovereignty of Vulnerability 91Becoming an Operating System 107Proprioceptive Sociality 133III. Millie’s Flock 149Cross Country 151What Social Worlds Are Made Of 163The Rest of a Life 181Epilogue 191Acknowledgments 195Notes 199Bibliography 209Index

“Danilyn Rutherford has given us a riveting and powerful chronicle. Her writing is luminous, moving, and deeply thoughtful. She carries us along on her path to knowledge gained over many years as she learns the most essential of life lessons from living with her disabled daughter Millie and the fellow travelers in the disability worlds she has traversed: What it means to be human in ways that embrace the vast diversity and ‘beautiful mystery’ of the bodyminds we are privileged to encounter.” - Faye Ginsburg, coauthor of Disability Worlds“Beautiful Mystery is that rare and precious book: both an unforgettable personal story and a powerfully argued view of how to think about profound human difference. Beautifully written and deeply moving.” - T. M. Luhrmann, author of How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others