Deputy Speaker of the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR RI) Lestari Moerdijat said that the involvement of women in cultural preservation efforts is increasingly urgent, considering the increasingly real threat of national cultural extinction.
"Traditionally, women have a central role in cultural preservation by passing on traditional values to future generations, starting within the family," Lestari said in a statement received in Jakarta on Friday.
He highlighted data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2024, which noted that 139 of the 718 regional languages identified in Indonesia were categorized as endangered.
In the same year, the Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Diplomacy of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology recorded that 134 large-scale traditional rituals or ceremonies were threatened with being discontinued due to high costs, complexity, and aging traditional leaders.
In addition, the Indonesian Puppetry Association reported in 2023 that of the 58 types of Indonesian wayang (besides Javanese Purwa shadow puppets), around 23 types are in a critically endangered condition due to a lack of audiences and the regeneration of puppeteers.
Lestari said that concrete steps to address these various challenges must be implemented immediately.
As a legislator of Commission X of the Indonesian House of Representatives, which oversees cultural affairs, he encouraged stakeholders at the central and regional levels to build strong collaborations in order to realize a sustainable cultural preservation mechanism.
"Women's potential to transform cultural values from an early age within the family environment must be part of this ongoing preservation effort," she said.
He hopes that a number of threats to the extinction of national culture can be immediately addressed by the relevant parties with strategic steps, in order to preserve the noble culture inherited from the nation's predecessors.
