Indonesian local wisdom: state of the art

This paper explores the dynamics of research on Indonesia’s local wisdom from the perspective of the nation’s researchers. Local wisdom is a magnet for moral learning, especially what cannot be avoided, namely its potential role for character-building education to prepare better future generations. The data collection involved a scientific research method of identifying research articles from the open-access journal. The template was analyzed to portray the literature mapping on Indonesian local wisdom from the open-access journal articles in the last five years. The dimension to identify covered the scope, rationale, method, and implication. In general, the scope of research in local wisdom in Indonesia covers four dominant study areas, namely education, language teaching, culture, and humanities. The rationales are based on Indonesia’s cultural heritage and diversity, the need to prepare a better generation of Indonesia, facing the social issues in the global world, and the current use of local languages. Indonesian local wisdom studies use the literature review, single-site case study, descriptive qualitative analysis, R&D research, content analysis, action research, and survey research. The implications were addressed to the area of pedagogy, the development of teaching materials, and the field of anthropology. However, few implications are found in covering the fields of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, tourism, design, and social science. Further studies on the elements of Indonesian local wisdom studies and their application to any field of studies would be worth exploring