The national shrine and the vernacular circuit: Disciplinary metrics and athletic dwelling in Indonesian badminton

This article interrogates sportification in Indonesia by positioning badminton not as a fully institutionalised system but as a contested social field structured by unequal regimes of value. While Indonesia's national identity is tightly bound to badminton supremacy – produced through what we conceptualise as a ‘National Shrine’ sustained by state discipline – this study argues that such a project is inherently partial and generative of precarity. Drawing on 8 months of multi-sited ethnography, the article traces athletes’ movements between elite training centres and the informal tarkam (inter-village) circuit. Mobilising the concepts of discipline, dwelling and moral economy, the findings show how the national system reduces athletes to metrics, rendering them disposable when performance declines. This process produces forms of precarity marked by exclusion and ‘digital eviction’. However, rather than disappearing, displaced athletes re-emerge within the tarkam circuit, where value is reorganised through patronage, reciprocity and local recognition. Here, badminton persists not as a state project but as a socially embedded practice. By foregrounding displacement over failure, this article challenges linear accounts of sportification. It demonstrates how national identity is both produced and unsettled beyond the National Shrine, within vernacular infrastructures that sustain the game's social life.