Description: This article discusses Indology and Marxist Hermeneutics. Although Indian civilization has been one of the most extensively researched fields in the Western Humanities departments, it remains one of the most misinterpreted subjects. Scholars have applied various theories and methods to study this ancient field. However, often their analyses and interpretations fail to do justice to this complex tradition. In the name of "scientific objectivity", they have often applied their own subjective bias. In this paper, I endeavor to demonstrate how the theories of Marx have misinterpreted Indian culture.

Description: This encyclopedia entry describes Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization. Interpol facilitates cross-border police cooperation and assists all organizations, authorities, and services with a mission to prevent or combat international crime.

Description: This article discusses the absence of a formal category of environmental ethics in Jainism and explores Jainism's historical relationship to environmental ethics. It also compares Jainist perspectives on the consumption of natural resources with other lifestyles. From the few examples of Jain "environmentalism", this article also seeks to redefine the categories such as "religion" and "environmental ethics", especially as they are applied to the non-Western parts of the world such as the Jains in India.

Description: This article discusses neural systems supporting avoidance behavior in healthy youths. Active avoidance involving controlling and modifying threatening situations characterizations many forms of clinical pathology, particularly childhood anxiety. Presently our understanding of the neural systems supporting human avoidance is largely based on nonhuman research. Establishing the generality of nonhuman findings to healthy children is a needed first step towards advancing developmental affective neuroscience research on avoidance in childhood anxiety. Accordingly, this investigation examined brain activation patterns to threatening cues that prompted avoidance in healthy youths. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, fifteen youths (ages 9-13) completed a task that alternatively required approach or avoidance behaviors. On each trial either a threatening 'Snake' cue or a 'Reward' cue advanced towards a bank containing earned points. Directional buttons enabled subjects to move cues away from (Avoidance) or towards the bank (Approach). Avoidance cues elicited activation in regions hypothesized to support avoidance in nonhumans (amygdala, insula, striatum and thalamus). Results also highlighted that avoidance response rates were positively correlated with amygdala activation and negatively correlated with insula and anterior cingulate activation. Moreover, increased amygdala activity was associated with decreased insula and anterior cingulate activity. Our results suggest nonhuman neurophysiological research findings on avoidance may ...

Description: This article explores the role of social capital. Investments in public libraries in developing countries have been made based on the idea that libraries contribute to societal democratization. Yet scholarly understanding of the relationships between public libraries and democratization is sharply limited. In this article the authors review historical studies of national public library systems that cast doubt on widely held assumptions that a positive relationship necessarily pertains between the establishment of public libraries and democracy. Based on this historical review and on sociological theories of social capital (e.g. Bourdieu 1986), the authors develop a theoretical framework intended to facilitate systematic investigation of the contributions public libraries may make to democracy. Using comparative historical and ethnographic methods, the authors analyze the relationship between public libraries and democratic systems of government in Namibia, Nepal, and Malawi, and find that in all three cases public libraries were established mainly during democratic regimes. However, they were not necessarily established by democratically elected governments directly, but rather because democratic regimes proved to be relatively open to the influence of diasporas and global civil society. The authors only find evidence of public libraries contributing to societal democratization, as the authors conceptualize the process, in Nepal ...