Friday, April 4, 2008

Negative Influence of Foreign Cultures on Cambodia

Every country around the world has its own culture to represent the nation. People can notice each other or know where they are from and who they are because of the culture. Culture includes language, tradition, custom, dressing, and so on. Cambodia is also a country that has
its own culture, but this culture is not such pure as before because our culture, now, is coming with foreign cultures. Mixing culture is not good for each country. What are the negative influences of foreign cultures on Cambodian culture?
The first negative influence is our culture will not exist in the world any more. As we know that culture is practiced by people. If people don't use our culture and use foreign culture, our culture will be dead in one day. As we can see, the way people dress is in Khmer culture; there are no
jeans, no T-shirts; there are only simple trousers or dresses made form silk. But, now people wear jeans, T-shirts especially girls they like wearing tight jeans or short skirts that our culture doesn't allow to do like that. However, those are not completely their faults because they imitate
that style form foreigners because of flowing foreign culture into our country. As a result, foreign culture can kill our culture easily.
The second reason is people will confuse the culture and they will not know which our culture is. Today, people still know what our culture is, but twenty years later people will not know our culture because we never use it; we use only foreign culture. People who are born twenty years
later will not know our culture and they will wonder if we have our own culture or not and they also think we pulverize that culture from the other because they can see on TV, that other country has culture like ours.
The last point is people around the world will not know and admire our culture anymore. They all know us, Cambodians, because of our culture, language, custom, and dressing. In contrast, we, ourselves, forget our culture. We never use our language; we never wear Khmer dresses. Thus, how can they know we are Khmer and how can our culture still remain in the world. People use only foreign language and dress foreign style cloth and the way they act as if they were foreigners. In consequence, people around the world will forget our culture.
In conclusion, three negative influences of foreign cultures on Cambodian culture are Khmer culture will not remain in the world, people get confused about the culture, and people around the world will not know our nation anymore. Thus, as we are Khmer, we should try to keep our
culture alive arid describe our culture to our children or students to know our culture and remember it forever to tell from one person to another. Culture alive means nation alive; good culture means good nation and god leader. Thus we should take measure to protect our culture from flowing foreign cultures into our country.