Centring the devastating case of five-year-old Michael Komape’s drowning in a pit latrine at school, this chapter discusses the ‘dis/empowerment paradox’ inherent in South Africa’s ‘transformative constitutionalism’. Through the example of the Komapes’ 2018 case against the Minister of Basic Education (2018), it reveals the limitations of transformative constitutionalism rooted in Euro-American liberalism, which resonates with a neoliberal political economy that has failed to relieve the impoverished majority of their dehumanising precarity. While the chapter highlights the failure of the South African government to relate and respond to the suffering of the people it is meant to serve, more profoundly, it exposes the limitations of transformative constitutionalism due to its inability to even ‘see’ (let alone, validate) the world-sense of its majority population as legitimate law-sense. The Komape case thus reveals three key insights: (1) the resistance of private law to transformative ideals, (2) the reluctance of South Africa’s legal culture to embrace decolonial transformation and pluralism, and (3) the tension(s) between the legal consciousness of ordinary South Africans and the dominant legal culture. The case therefore underscores the need for Ntu Constitutionalism: a system grounded in indigenous normative priorities and robustly representative of South Africa’s marginalised communities and their needs.

The chapter probes the relationship between law and performance in the context of transitional justice. By analyzing cultural productions and public performances such as films and theater plays, the chapter examines the ways in which lustration has become dramatized through the themes of secrecy, deception, betrayal, and the desire to know and not to know. While these cultural practices offer insight into the public intimate life of lustration, they also show how they become a site and form of social opposition and critical engagement with the terms of lustration and moral autopsy. In particular, the chapter offers a detailed ethnographic study of the experimental theater play by Wojtek Ziemilski, Small Narration (Mala Narracja), which highlights the layered relationship between theater and law and shows the extent to which the judicial and moralized forms of examination and judgment might travel and be contested by alternative forms of knowing, not-knowing, and relating to life, history, and politics.

For many adults, the idea that infants and toddlers are ‘knowers, thinkers and theorisers’ is a strange one. Such concepts are often associated with older children whose abilities to build and express understandings are more evident and align more readily with traditional ideas about learning and teaching. Furthermore, cognitive states and processes such as ‘knowing’, ‘thinking’ and ‘understanding’ are not visible in the same way that physical, social and emotional behaviours. This means that they have to be inferred and interpreted, especially when pre-verbal infants and toddlers cannot tell you what is going on in their heads. Together these challenges may result in a deficit view that, instead of seeing infants and toddlers as active and capable learners, positions very young as waiting to learn. Also, an emphasis on meeting physical and emotional needs may come at the cost of overlooking infants and toddlers cognitive capabilities and potentials.

This chapter discusses the creation of the intelligible world, which comes to being through the formative activity of the Good on its first product. The Great Kinds are dynamically balanced principles, by virtue of which Intelligible Matter received form as Being, Movement achieves Rest, and Difference is united by Identity, thus establishing Intellect, the One-Many. The three crucial principles of the Plotinian metaphysics are outlined: (1) the principle of the microcosm, (2) the imaging principle, and (3) the principle of the triadic selfhood. In light of the first principle, at all the levels of reality there exist individual beings who exist within and are united with the great principles of reality by virtue of two forms of participation. The notions of vertical and horizontal participation are defined. The imaging principle relates to reality consisting of hierarchies of dynamically produced images of higher archetypes. What is expressed participates vertically in its archetype. The third principle is a triadic intertwining of loving and knowing with selfhood. The “negative” or “potential” aspects of the Great Kinds are described as the metaphysical seeds of evil and fall.

This essay describes how the HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) in Berlin was been transformed through its exploration of the Anthropocene. Originally an institution dedicated to showcasing non-European cultures, it now focuses on the new relationship between culture and the planet. The “Anthropocene-Project” began by asking how a cultural institution might approach the large-scale transformation confronting our societies? It soon became clear that the HKW must change its methods and processes. Instead of approaching the world via representations in exhibitions and talks, the HKW developed an experimental mode of active cultural production that called “curating ideas in the making.” This method combines aesthetic with scientific approaches, and reflects the fact that in the Anthropocene, knowledge production has to change: the categorical frameworks developed during the last 200 years are no longer adequate to confront the problems of the radically altered situation we find ourselves in.

An alternative way of initiating the purchase consists for the customer in requesting a specific product. The way requests are formatted, and the way they are produced by looking and possibly pointing at the products, displays whether the customer is a connoisseur or a novice, and project the relevant service expected. The seller provides for a differentiated response to requests displaying more or less knowledge of the requested product. Whereas customers knowing what they request just name the product and are fetched with it, customers not fully knowing what they request are responded to in a more expanded way by the seller. The seller engages in informing – providing a diversity of verbal information about the cheese, within an expert and relatively standardized discourse –  and in showing the product, associating visual characteristics with verbal descriptions. When this is considered by the participants as an insufficient basis for decision-making, the seller offers them to taste the cheese. In this way, the access to the materiality of cheese is provided, depending on the sequential unfolding of the interaction, in a stepwise way ordering vision, talk, and closer sensorial approaches, like touch, smell, and taste.

The opening chapter introduces the narrator, Mrs. Gribbin, who brings the revised manuscript with her and who, throughout the book, makes possible a level of commentary that would not otherwise be possible. Key terms and concepts – such as learning, theories, science, folk beliefs and naïve psychology, pop psychology, and approaches to gathering and evaluating psychological information – are introduced and clarified at the outset. The chapter makes the point that good theories are evaluated not so much in terms of whether they are right or wrong but more in light of how useful they are. Their usefulness is reflected in how well they summarize important facts, how clear and understandable they are, how thought-provoking, how valuable for predicting as well as explaining, and how practical they are in the real world. The chapter concludes with brief previews of each of the next 11 chapters. Mrs. Gribbin describes these previews as hors d’oeuvres, brief appetizers that not only provide a hint of what is to come, but that each include an intriguing question that the reader will be able to answer after having read the chapter.