This chapter focuses on the final decade of the mandate period, which was marked by notable investment in both psychiatric institutions and expertise. Against the backdrop of the Second World War and with partition on the horizon, this chapter traces two developments in particular: the opening of the third and final government mental health hospital at Jaffa in 1944 and the cultivation of expertise within the department of health around wartime trauma and mental health nursing. Far from reflecting any new vision for colonial development on the part of the mandate government, a closer look at each of these developments reveals that investment was driven as much by colonial subjects and crisis as by British design, and built figuratively and literally on the foundations of the past.

This chapter centres around the encounter between patient and psychiatrist, and between mandate Palestine and new methods of psychiatric treatment being developed around the world in the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, it focuses on three distinct methods of treatment: patient work or occupational therapy; insulin- and cardiazol-shock therapies; and electro-convulsive therapy. All in different ways sought to work (on) the body to cure the mind and were introduced into private and government mental health institutions in mandate Palestine in the decade before 1948. Though these techniques tantalised with the promise of transcending context through their universal applicability, this chapter highlights instead how these psychiatric techniques travelled to and were deployed within Palestine in a highly uneven way, and attempts to piece together some sense of how patients and their families responded to and understood these treatments as well.

Extant literature on Chinese elite politics tend to argue that Chinese officials work under a political system very different from a western-Weberian bureaucracy. Factional patron-client relationship is considered a dominant factor affecting political appointment of high-level officials. However, prior findings have been mainly based on governors of provincial or prefectural jurisdictions or central committee members. State Council ministers and vice-ministers are largely missing in the previous analysis. Our research examines State Council ministers and vice-ministers under the administration of President Xi Jinping. This high-level bureaucrat group arguably is most comparable to the political appointees in Weberian bureaucracies. We systematically analyze their types of patronage along the policy-politics divide and loyalty basis. We also bring in the dimension of expertise to further identify the extent of professionalization of Chinese ministers. We find a variety of patronage existing among Chinese ministers. Political loyalty is only one kind of the patronage affecting personnel configurations of the State Council.

This chapter sketches the history of movement conservatism’s impact on American literature from the 1950s to the present. Midcentury conservatives, in their war against an intelligentsia that they perceived as dominated by liberal voices, evolved a model of counter-expertise that continues to inform right-wing intellectual practice today. This model was influenced by midcentury disciplinary conflicts between literature and the social sciences, with conservatives affirming a literary model of truth against the rationalism of social scientific discourse. Focusing on writers who published in the book review section of National Review, this chapter shows how the idea of conservative counter-expertise attracted critics and fiction writers such as Joan Didion, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, and Garry Wills. However, the conservative critique of the liberal intelligentsia was in the process of turning into a critique of expertise as such; this critique pushed many of these writers away from the magazine and helped fashion the version of the left/eight divide that defines American politics today.

Separation of powers or, more exactly, the rule of law, due process or, in Europe, the right to a fair trial influence the institutional setting of antitrust or regulatory authorities and law enforcement. An increased role given to specific regulation or antitrust in order to tackle some fundamental issues posed by the concentration of economic-political power does not go without independent and impartial decision-making from an institutional and procedural, a personal or a financial and lobbying perspective.

In this chapter, König examines an array of ‘literary interactions’ in Pliny’s 10th book of Letters. She draws particular attention to the book’s ‘heteroglossia’ – the multiplicity of linguistic registers and literary genres that it evokes and adopts – and she shows how that heteroglossia enables Pliny to accrue increasing authority and expertise as the book progresses. Starting with letters 10.1-14, she first explores intertexts between Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan and other close-contemporary literature (in particular, the Panegyricus and Frontinus’ De Aquis). Her focus then shifts to Pliny’s incorporation of a range of specialist discourses (architectural, religious, legal, financial, hydraulic, etc.) across the rest of the book, discourses which gradually flesh out his credentials as an administrator with the ability to command many different areas of government. She ends by exploring Pliny’s interaction with Trajan via an allusion to Pliny the Elder’s address to Titus at the start of his encyclopaedic Natural History. In drawing attention to the range and impact of different kinds of intertexts across Letters 10 – from specific textual allusions to generic interdiscursivity – she underlines what this seemingly ‘administrative’ correspondence can teach us about Roman reading and writing habits and the blurred boundary between ‘literary’ and non/less-‘literary’ texts.

The most important cognitive taxonomy in education is Bloom’s taxonomy. The revised taxonomy has two dimensions. The knowledge dimension consists of factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive knowledge. The cognitive-process dimension consists of remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Other taxonomies expand on these cognitive skills to include social and emotional skills such as social engagement, cooperation, and emotional resilience. Still others add ethical, civic, and cultural dimensions. Developing talent in areas such as mathematics, music, and the visual arts requires general cognitive abilities, mental flexibility, and creativity. Motivation and conscientiousness are also needed to support learning and engagement. Predictors of performances in a sample of more than 6,000 athletes revealed that participation in multiple sports is better for superior performances at the adult level. World-class athletes typically participated in multiple sports, began playing their major sport later, and initially reached performance milestones at a slower rate than their competitors.

The Conclusion summarises pathways towards a wider theoretical trajectory for studying theatre anthropologically. What can public art institutions, especially theatres, tell us about the ethical relevance of art in German and European society today? How do artists in such institutions reflect on their practice, methods, and theories, and in doing so, what kinds of expertise do they develop? What methods and theoretical frameworks do we require to develop new approaches to professional public theatre today? The conclusion constitutes an outlook on the wider import and significance of this interdisciplinary study for anthropology, theatre, and performance theory.

The Introduction situates the main theoretical framework and contextualises the book amid the institutional landscape of modern-day Germany. It analyses the productive albeit difficult relationship between anthropology and theatre, as well as the crucial intersections and failures to connect ethnography as a method and contemporary performance studies. The introduction outlines the role of theatre as a modern form of self-cultivation in Germany and introduces the book’s key concept of theatre as a scalar ethico-aesthetic tradition. It discusses the unique scope of anthropology to study both micro-level practices of institutionalised traditions, as well as to grasp wider cultural and historic patterns that have shaped the national traditions of German public theatre. The introduction also outlines the ethnographic accounts through which this book unfolds how such an anthropological study of contemporary German theatre renders intelligible the tensions and troubles of a self-proclaimed ‘state of the arts’.

Chapter 12 opens by asking readers to identify what they know about a relatively unknown topic, and to formulate some questions about the topic; they then study the topic, identify what’s now known, and finally compare notes from before and after study. It’s surprisingly hard for one person to perceive what is given information for someone else because what we know interferes with figuring out what they know. We are in a sense cursed by our knowledge, seeing more in hindsight than is justified. The chapter describes studies with children and studies with adults showing that our current understanding blinds us to our own prior understanding and to someone else’s current understanding. In part because people have strong funds of knowledge on the topic of language, this curse or bias is especially vital to consider. For example, speakers of English unconsciously know the language’s basic sentence structure even if they don’t describe that structure using grammatical terms. This chapter’s Closing Worksheet asks readers to find out how people typically use the terms for key concepts in their demonstrations. For example, what does "sentence" mean to many people?

This chapter summarises the argument of the book. Through a discussion of “Brexit”, it then explores the extent to which arguments about expert ignorance could travel beyond rule of law reform, for instance, to studies of governance more broadly. It also discusses the politics of the methods I have proposed to study expert ignorance.

The Introduction provides a summary of the central arguments and outlines the chapters of the book.

This chapter presents the field of rule of law reform as the context for the study of expert ignorance. It argues that, for some rule of law experts, the rule of law is underdetermined in a radical way. Analysing the scholarly and practitioner literature on rule of law reform, it shows that this position is meaningfully widespread in the field. It contrasts this view with that prevailing in the literature on rule of law reform, which imagines that rule of law experts seek to derive their authority from their knowledge about how to do rule of law reform, leading to effects like the poor transplantation of laws and institutions. I also introduce some of the stylistic and methodological problems this question raises and point to my responses: fictionalised and plurivocal reflections on my rule of law reform work. This entails a particular form of authorial presence that reflects who I understand a rule of law reformer to be – someone who can tell enough of a story to bring the reader along while fragmenting, shifting, and making fragile the story, the author, and her authority.

This chapter grapples with the possibility that a historical account of rule of law reform might provide both context and insight into reformers’ own attempts to radically critique rule of law reform. I make two arguments. The first is methodological: reformers’ ignorance about the rule of law makes it impossible to conduct an authoritative historical sociology, genealogy, or historicised immanent critique of reformers. The second is historical: I offer a historical account of rule of law reform but frame it as a specific and standalone political intervention. I argue that a standalone profession of ignorant rule of law reformers emerged in the late 1990s or early 2000s, when development ideas about the form and function of institutions shifted from a neoliberal understanding of institutions as a means of giving form to the sublime complexity of the world, to being a complex sublime themselves.

This chapter offers a novel theoretical and methodological apparatus to reinterpret rule of law reform. I draw on aesthetic theory to reimagine rule of law reform as an aesthetic practice, in which efforts to build the sublime ‘rule of law’ produce both shadows of the rule of law and the shadowy figure of the rule of law reformer. I go on to argue that this aesthetic remains irreducibly embodied in the body of the reformer and that rule of law reform is, thus, in a very real sense, performance. I turn to performance studies, as well as Stanislavski’s system of training actors, to analyse these performances, and discuss precisely how they complement the methods in the previous chapter. I then put this new method into practice, rewriting my cases as dramatic performances. In doing so, I show how expert ignorance might productively be understood through the dramatic structure of ignorant experts’ action.