Ramadhan Food Culture in Aceh ( by. Zahrani B)

Ramadhan food culture in Aceh is quiet unique. When ramadhan comes fasting people never be afraid about food to break a fast. They just need to go to any mosque they can reach and a plate of hot and spicy porridge will be served.

When ramadhan comes in Aceh men who live near by mosque come together in a mosque to prepare amount of food to break a fast. Usually they cook an earthen cooking pot of hot and spicy rice porridge called "bubur kanji rumbi". Bubur kanji rumbi seems like "bubur ayam" in Java but consists of more spice with 2 or 3 kinds of stocks; shrimp, chicken and beef stock. The content is also little bit different. Bubur ayam has a lot of topping but bubur kanji rumbi almost has no topping just spreaded by fried onion.

Bubur kanji rumbi only cooked and served by men without woman at all. Usually at 03.00 p.m they have been in mosque and prepare the foodstuff. Then at 04.00 p.m they start cooking. It take so much time, they use firewood to cook it in a big earthen cooking pot in order to serve to anyone who wants to break their fast in mosque. Then bubur kanji rumbi is ready to served at 06.00 p.m since breaking a fast time is 06.30 p.m in Aceh.

"Meugang" as a unique ramadhan culture in Aceh ( by: Zahrani B)

      Aceh has such a unique ramadhan culture or tradition which is did only once in year called "hari megang"; a day before ramadhan. The day before ramadhan comes we can find a unique phenomenon in traditional market, especially the biggest traditional market in Banda Aceh. We will see a bunch of people fulfill the butcher shop or bucther stand since early morning, and of course every body seems buying amount of beef. This kind of phenomenon not only can see in the traditional market but also in "tanah lapang" (some place seems like 'alun-alun in Java). Special for this day some of  field will be changed to such a butcher shop. Start from early morning about 05.00 a.m every butcher comes, butchering cow and lamb, and trade it there. Actually the butchering take place at 03.00 a.m. This phenomenon of course rising a question for the people who see it for first time.

        Aceh people almost not serve amount of meet or beef  when they eat. They tend to eat seafood or chicken sometimes since they have a mind set that meet is a luxurious and expensive food. They'd prefer to  buy outside when they want to eat than cooking it them seleves, or sometime they can eat it when they are presenting at such a party. Moreover, some of them only eat meet when the ramadhan comes.

        Since the ramadhan comes, as a religious person, Aceh peoples want to be focus on their religiousness ritual without bothering by thinking about daily food. Since meet is a kind of foodstuff which is full of energy, the day before ramadhan they buy some meet and cook it in slow cooking. Thus, it also could keep for long time. The cooking is saved in saparately small pack. When they want to eat they just take some pack as much as they need and heat it aminute. After preparing amount of meet, Aceh people almost not go to the market for 2 weeks to buy another foodstuff but they just go to a small shop to find some vegetables and fruits. They can stay at home be good at religious service a long ramadhan without feel hungry at all.

Social Networks in Korean Society ( Summarized by: Zahrani B.)

1. Theoretical approaches to "non-material" forms of capital: cultural, symbolic, social capital in socialogical theory.

Then term culturalcapital represents th collection f non-economic forces uch as family background, social clas, varying investmen in ommitments to education different resources, etc. whic influence acadmic success. Bordieu dstinguishes thee forms of cultural capital.

• The embodied state isdirectly link to and incorporated within the individual and represents what they know and can do. Embodied capital can be increased by investing time into self improvement in the form of learning. 
• The objecteified state of cultural capital is represented by cultral goods, material, objects such as books, paintings, instruments or machines. They can be appropriated both materially with economic capital and symbolically via embodies caital.
• 
  
  Institutionalized state provides academic credentials and qualifcations which create a 'certificateof cultural competence which confers on its holder a conventional, constant, legally uaranteed value with respect to power.'
  
  
  
  
  
  

Bordieu states that the ability and talent of an individual is primarily determined by the time and cultural capital invested in them by their parents. Similarly, he argues that the scholastic yield from educational action depends on the cultural capital previously invested by the family.

"Bordieu defines social capital as. 'the aggregate of the actual or potential recources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.'(248) An individual's social caital is detremined by the size or thei relationship network, the sum of its umuated recouces (both cultur and economic), a how successfully (qucky) the indiviual ca set them it inmotion. Bordieu recognizes that all types of cpital can be derved from economic capital through varying efforts of transformation."

Social capital-may be crucially important not only for achieving but also for maintaning existing social/economic status. Social capital works as a set of networks connections and reciprocal mutual obligations that, in many cases, are essential for individual's survival in  highly network-centered society.

2. Social networks in South Korean society

Yeonjul, based on person's ascribed status (parental status) and various forms of cultural capital, especially such institutionalised forms of cultural capital as academic credentials. The strongest forms of yeonjul are regional (usually belonging to a group of the natives of one and the same town/province) and high school/university ties. Basically yeonjul works in the same way as social network: serve as the surest way to find a job, dodge a draft etc. "SNU Republic" and TK mafia are example of  two the strongest yeonjul in Korea. SNU is the most prestigious university and the strongest alumni yeonjul group, and TK is Taegu-Kyeongsang Province and as a strong regional yeonjul group. From the viewpoint of South Korean progressives, various yeonjuls solidify on the informal level the social borders and barriers of the class society --due to the strength of leading privileged yeonjuls, prospects of social advancement for a person without right class background (economic capital) to enter a right yeonjul, are very poor. Yeonjuls are often analysed as a form of "class alienation".

Four facts about social networks in Korea.

First, social network functions as an important mode of social exchange. People with higher socio-economics status tend to focus more on instrumental advantage of large network size, thus minimizing transaction costs, and getting information quickly and cheaply.

Second, social network in Korea shows high homopily, or very homogenous association within the line of sex, age, and region.

Third, social network functions as a reference group so that it asserts an enormous influence on individual's value and attitude.

Fourth, those who have wider range of networks tend to have less authoritian attitude, but they are more cautious and have deep distrust on judicial justice.

Summary: Death Without Weeping; Has poverty ravaged mother love in the shantytowns of Brazil? (Zahrani B.)

The Alto do Cruzeiro is one of three shantytowns surrounding the large market town of Bom Jesus in the sugar plantation zone of Pernambuco in Northeast Brazil, one of the many zones of neglect that have emerged in the shadow of tarnished economic miracle of Brazil. For the women and children of the Alto do Cruzeiro the only miracle is that some of them have managed to stay alive at all.

The Northeast is a region of the vast proportions (approximately twice the size of Texas) and of equally vast social and development problems. The nine states that make up the region are the poorest in the country and are representative of the Third World within a dynamic and rapidly industrializing nation.

Life expctan in the Northet is ony forty years, largely because of apallingly hugh rate of infant and child mortality. Approximately one million children Brazil under the age of five die each year. The children of the Northeast, especially those born in shantytowns on the periphery of urban life, are at a very high risk of death. In these areas, children are born without the traditional protection of breast feeding, subsistence gardens, stable marriages, and multiple adult caretakers that exist in the interior. In the hillside shantytowns that spring up around cities or, in this case, interior market towns, marriage are brittle, single parenting is norm, and women are frequently forced into the shadow economy of domestic work in the hornes of the rich or into unprotected and oftentimes "scab" wage labor on the surrounding sugar plantations, where they clear land for planting and weed for pittance, sometimes less than a dollar a day The women of the Alto may not bring their babies  with them into the homes of wealthy, where the often-sic infants are considered sources of contaminations, and they cannot carry the little one to the riverbanks where they wash clothes because the river isheavily infested iwth schistosomes and other deadly parasites. Nor can theuy carry their young cildren to the plantation, which are often several miles away. At wages of a dollar a day, the women of  The Alto cannot hire babysitters. Older children who are not in school will sometimes serve as somewhat indifferen caretakers But any child not in school is also expected to find wage work. In most cases babies are simply left at home alone, the door securely fastened . And so many also die alone and unattended.
More than 350 babies died in The Alto during 1965 alone--this form a shantytowns population of little more than 5,000. But that was not something surprised. There were reasons enough for the deaths in the miserable conditions of shantytown life. Something that was puzzled was the seeming indefference of Alto women to the death of their infants, and their willingness to attribute to their own tiny offspring an aversion to life that  made their death seems wholly natural, indeed all but anticipated.

Let's talk about mental program; values and culture

This chapter deals with definition and measurement of mental programs in people in general, and values and culture in particular. Mental programs distinguished into three levels of uniqueness; universal, collective, and individul. the least unique but most basic is the universal level which is shared by all, or almost all, mankind. This is the biological "operating system" of the human body, but it includes a range of expressive behaviors such a laughing and weeping and associative and agressive behaviors which are found in higher animals.

The collective level of mental programming is shared with some but not with all other people; it is common to people belonging to a certain group or category, but different among people belonging to other groups or categories. The whole area of subjective human culture belongs to this level, for example the language in which we express ourselves, the deference we show to our elders, the physical distance, etc.

The individual level of human programming is truly unique part-no two people are programmed exactly alike. This is the level of individual personality, and it provides for a wide range of alternative behaviors within the same collective culture.

The values are distinguished into values as the desired and values as the desirable. Values itselves are those things that really matter to each of us. in fact, values determine our subjective definition of rationality. Because our values are programmed early in our lives, they are non-irational.

The term of  "value" or "values" is used in all social sciences with different thought bot completely unrelated meanings. Values have both intensity and direction. Mathematically, values have a size and a sign: they can be represented by arrows along in a line. If we "hold" a value, this means that the issue involved has a certain relevance for us(intensity) and that we identify certain outcomes as a "good" and others as "bad" (direction).

When we talk about values as the desired and the desirable we have to distinguish between as what people actually desire versus what they think ought to be desired; they should not be equated.  In most of the psychological and socialogical research literature, "social desirability" is treated as something undesirable to the researcher.

Culture consists in patterned ways o thinking, feeling, and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly by simbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values (Kluckhohn, 1951: 86, 5). Cultures is treated as "th collective progrmmingogf the mind which distinguishes the members of one huan group from another. The word "culture" is usually reservedfo societies (in the modern world is speaked of "nations") or for ethnic or regional groups, but it can be applied equally to othr human collectivities or categories a profession, or a family.

Contemporary Korea at Glance: Korean Dish Part; a pickle of Kimchi (by Z. Balqis)

The wellknown kimchi is a kind of  Korean traditional fermented dish made from chinese cabbage with little bit sour, spicy and hot taste. Koreans sereve kimchi at almost every meal. Kimchi seems like koreans soul. Moreover, Koreans said, " I can't imagine live without kimchi" even in fact, kimchi was originally from China but without spicy taste and it little bit salty.

Recently kimchi not only as a dish or pickle but it also transform to another kind of  main menu, for example kimchi soup, kimchi noodle, rice-roll kimchi (kimchi kimpab), even as a western meal; burger, pizza, and spaghetti.

Kimchi also become an export commidity for Korea. It earns about one million US dollar every year. Moreover the export of kimchi to foreign countries is rapidly increasing. While Korens immigrant to other countries they continue to eat kimchi as a side dish. It gradually gain popularity even among foreigners. Accordingly kimchi could be find wherever Koreans live.

Contemporary Korea at Glance: Korean Clohing Part; Today Hanbok (by Z. Balqis)

Hanbok is Korean traditional clothing. Recently Korean people doesn't wear that kind of cloth as a daily clothing. They'd prefer to wear it when be present at such a traditional ceremony; chuseok, seollal, etc, also at the wedding ceremony and 60th or 70th birthday celebration.

Basically hanbok is consist of 2 parts; top and under. For female top one is shape of a vest or waistcoat named cheogori, and the under one is a skirt called chima.
Male Hanbok seems almot same, also devided into two parts. The top is also called cheogori and it's weared with a shape of trousers called paji.

Nowadays, Korean hanbok pattern not only available in traditional style but also in recently fashion style. One of Korea designer started to modernize hanbok by putting such a western touch on the under part of hanbok. Lee Young-Hee (Korean designer) changed the skirt ( chima ) by trousers, and the other designer change the traditional hanbok style into you can see plastic patchwork dress. Modernizing hanbok make hanbok changes in many parts, but Korean designers still keep the original hanbok essence; elegance with the simplicity.