China Studies in India—3
I feel deeply honoured to have been invited to deliver the Keynote Address at this Fourth All-India Conference of China Studies (2011), held this time at the University of Hyderabad, an institution for which, over several years of association in various capacities, I have developed a strong affection. I also feel humble in this present company of accredited China scholars. Although my first two academic degrees were in Chinese Studies—in fact, old-style language/literary studies that went by the now unfashionable and politically incorrect title of ‘Oriental Studies’—I have spent most of my professional life as a sociologist/socio-cultural anthropologist. I should say that the focus of Indian sociology, as with other social science disciplines in the Indian context, has been almost exclusively on India, the unwritten (and in my opinion misguided) assumption being that such inward-focused research is transparently of greater social relevance—to the ‘masses’ or to ‘policy-makers’, as the case may be. There is an old English idiom, deployed of course in a completely different context, that says: ‘Nothing so dead as an old flame’. My own continuing involvement with China Studies through all these years, albeit on the professional periphery, speaks to the contrary. But my attachment is not merely sentimental, fanning the dying embers of an erstwhile passion. I truly believe that a comparative perspective, born of familiarity with another society (besides Europe/the US which is invariably our default ‘Other’) may constructively renovate our sociological understanding of ‘Indian’ society. At the same time, I also fully believe that China Studies must engage fully and self-consciously
The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us
In the streets of India, camels pull carts loaded with construction materials, and monkeys race across roads, dodging cars. In China, men in Mao jackets pedal bicycles along newly built highways, past skyscrapers sprouting like bamboo. Yet exotic India is as near as the voice answering an 800 number for one dollar an hour. Communist China is as close as the nearest Wal-Mart, its shelves full of goods made in Chinese factories. Not since the United States rose to prominence a century ago have we seen such tectonic shifts in global power; but India and China are vastly different nations, with opposing economic and political strategiesstrategies we must understand in order to survive in the new global economy. The Elephant and the Dragon tells how these two Asian nations, each with more than a billion people, have spurred a new "gold rush," and what this will mean for the rest of the world.
Electrophysiological evidence that a subset of midbrain dopamine neurons integrate the reward signal induced by electrical stimulation of the posterior mesencephalon
This study was aimed at determining whether midbrain dopamine (DA) neurons are trans-synaptically activated by rewarding electrical stimulation applied near the midline in the posterior mesencephalon (PM), and in the affirmative, whether the increase in firing was proportional to the rewarding effectiveness of the stimulation. Experiments were performed on male Long-Evans rats trained to lever press to obtain 400 ms trains of cathodal rectangular pulses. Following the training period, curves relating the rates of responding to the stimulation frequencies were determined at two current intensities and reward thresholds were calculated for each animal. Each animal was then anesthetized with urethane (1.2 g/kg, i.p.) and firing rate of DA neurons were recorded before, during, and after each of 50 trains (1 train/3 s) of stimulation to the PM using stimulation parameters that either sustained near threshold responding (rewarding), or failed to sustain responding (non-rewarding), in the behavioral tests. A total of 24 DA cells were recorded from 13 behaviorally trained animals, and of these, 17 (71%) responded to rewarding stimulation by an increase in firing, five (21%) were unresponsive and two (8%) were inhibited. In 12 of the 17 cells that were activated, the increase in firing was proportional to the rewarding effectiveness of the stimulation rather than the total strength of the stimulation. These results provide evidence that a subset of midbrain DA neurons are trans-synaptically activated by rewarding PM stimulation and constitute a second, or subsequent, stage of the reward-relevant pathway that integrates the PM reward signal.