The Disappearance of Sundanese Cultures

The Disappearance of Sundanese Cultures

Modernization and globalization nowadays have widely spread all over the world. This has caused Sundanese culture face a very big problem. It’s almost extinct. It’s not impossible that someday it will really disappear from the world.

Firstly, modernization and globalization have evacuated the culture of the native to the very border side of culture. In the other hand, rationalization and technology development have made the life of Sundanese become more modern and make things easy to be done for them. However, the risk is the extinction of the social systems inside, the religious institutions and the fading of the Sundanese traditionalism. As the example is the extinction of the Sundanese traditional identity, such as Kaulinan Sunda. Gatrik, Galah, Perang Gobang, Rerebonan, Bancakan, Ucing SUmput, Oray-orayan, and many others have been disappeared by the pop culture, such as Birthday Party, Party, Television, Theatre, VCD, Disco, and even drugs. Technology has removed the Kaulinan culture from the old SUndanese who were close to nature. Kaulinan nowadays has just become a memory for the older generation. Children don’t even know what traditional games of their origin are.

Arts, traditional musics and Sundanese entertaining performances are just the same. Reog, calung, angklung, arumba, kacapi, suling, wayang, kuda lumping, and many others are still can be found on certain ceremony such as wedding, celebration of circumcision, celebrating the Independence day of Indonesia, welcoming party of important persons, and etc. However, it’s still difficult to find the existence of those art performances. If there were no dalang Asep Sunarya, the savior of wayang before the reformation of new regime, probably wayang would disappear. Unfortunately, the desire of Asep to keep wayang alive as the culture heritage of Sundanese was not followed by another artists. Reog, calung and angklung slowly disappear from the society.

Secondly, it has been a long story that Sundanese Language is not interesting and assumed to be unimportant fo students in schools. The rule of the language makes it difficult to be mastered. Students and youngsters’ interest in studying Sundanese language always decrease little by little. Since this problem has been existing for a long period, it’s difficult to find Sundanese language teachers, as well as the master of letters. We just know some of them. They are Rustandi Kartakusumah, Wahyu Wibisana, Ki Umbara, Apip Mustopa, and etc. But this number is still far from hope.

Even in cities, many parents don’t teach their children to use Sundanese language. Modern Sundanese family doesn’t speak Sundanese as the daily language. They tend to choose using Indonesian that is considered as more modern. In young families, the parents teach their children to call them “papi-mami”, “papa-mama”, or “ayah-ibu” instead of “abah-ambu”, “emih-apih”, “ema-apa, “abi-umi”, or “indung-bapa”. People using Sundanese language in daily conversation are assumed to be not Indonesian.

Thirdly, is the poor knowledge about history of Sunda. Historically, Sunda’s history is not as great as Java’s. The kingdoms in Sunda such as Tarumanegara, Galuh, Padjadjaran and Sumedang Larang were the local kingdoms and not expansionist so that they didn’t have big supremacies as the other kingdoms had. The authentic identity of SUndanese culture also has lost its function in the bigger culture hegemony such as Java, Islam, and the West. A historian from Dutch, Hans Kahler, wrote that since Sunda was defeated by Majapahit, Sunda had disappeared from the history. This sad situation is supported by the very little number of SUnda historiography. It seems that the existence of Sunda history is not quite interesting for the historians.

From thos 3 cases, we can see that Sundanese culture has almost extinct. These may cause the extinction of sunda culture in the future. This extinction will occur if the people do not optimize the function of sundanese culture. Lost of cultural function can be seen from the fact that the SUndanese’ youngsters find it unimportant to behave as SUndanese. The extinction of culture is not an impossible thing, so the task for the government, the intellectuals, and Sundanese elite group to think about a cultural strategy so that SUndanese culture still survive in this globalization and modernization era. In the end, it’s hoped that SUndanese culture can be side by side to the modernization.


By : u-know wicky