Danilyn Rutherford

Experience

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. In 2016, she received an NSF Scholars Award for research on disability, personhood, and communication in the United States. She is the author of Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier (Princeton, 2003), Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua (Chicago, 2012), Living in the Stone Age: Reflections on the Origins of a Colonial Fantasy (Chicago, 2018), and, most recently, Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World (Duke, 2025).