The Importance of Preserving Indonesian Cultural Heritage

The first importance is economic value, the second is morality value, now the third importance of preserving Indonesian cultural heritages that the people of Indonesia have to be more aware is the fact that culture gives a nation an identity. Identity is the thing that makes a nation unique and can be told apart from another. That is the most basic function of an identity. But the actual benefits of having an identity goes much deeper. If we trace back to the previous paragraph, having an identity helps to attract more visitors to the archipelago. How it works is that it gives a unique trait that only exist in the nation itself.

If a nation doesn’t have an identity, then it will be the same as the other nation, therefore there wouldn’t be a reason to visits them.  Another example of the benefits of having an identity is to boost the wellbeing of the nation and the people living in it by giving them a sense of belonging. Take an example of an organization. When the organization have a strong identity, a uniqueness that they hold dear, it will make the members to be more confident and more active to keep improving their organization to reach their goals. 

They feel that this organization is theirs, this is the sense of belonging that is mentioned above. For a bigger social system just like a nation, this benefits still holds, and can even holds more power than the one in a small organization. When Indonesian residence felt their identity as Indonesian by all the cultures that they have seen and practiced every day, they will try to keep improving to give back to the country because they now have a sense of belonging. 

Now, what about if the people of the archipelago doesn’t preserve their own cultural heritage? The things that will happen is the exact opposite of the importance above. Indonesia will not be able to hold its identity, and lost the benefits of having it in the first place. The number of visitors will fall down, leading to a much bigger series of disadvantages, and their own people will not be fighting to improve their life and their country. 

The passage above shows that having an identity is clearly one of the importance of preserving Indonesian culture that when being ignored will be a disaster, and the local residence once again have to do the preservation to avoid it from really happening.

The last but not least importance of preserving the cultural heritages of Indonesia is the unity of the nation that is being obtained by the very act of trying to preserve the thousands of different cultures in the archipelago. The key here is unity, because when a nation doesn’t have any culture that they fight for, a custom that they are trying to maintain, the very difference between them and the other country, a nation will crumble as it will not have a reason to unite anymore. This importance can differ from country to country, but for Indonesia, they even has their own slogan, that is ”Unity in Diversity”. 

When another country might think that having difference in culture can make a separation between areas, in Indonesia, the opposite is true. The difference itself is what make Indonesia as it is. When the people don’t preserve Indonesian culture anymore, what would happen is of course the culture won’t be as diverse as it used to be, even could be a singular cultural country. It destroys the fundamental part of Indonesia in itself, and they will lose the unity that based on diversity. In a simpler manner, they will surely be separated. 

Preserving Indonesian cultural heritage is very important because a lot of things, but the last but not least in this essay is the unity that the diverse culture will give out.

There are a lot of importance of preserving the Indonesian cultural heritages, such as mentioned above. Starting from the economic value that they give, the moral value, the identity and the unity that it holds. Those are the ones in this essay, but in reality, there won’t be any paper big enough to list all of its importance. Knowing this, the youth must get a sense of responsibility to keep all the cultural heritage in Indonesia running and existing, for the sake of themselves, or even the next generation of youngster in this rich of culture archipelago.