Mangkrak: When Infrastructure Refuses to Function — An STS and Anthropological Inquiry
Convener: Hatib A. Kadir
Co-convener: Indrawan Prabaharyaka
The original meaning of mangkrak was recorded in an early twentieth-century Dutch dictionary as “putting one’s hands on one’s hips while acting in anger.” Later, the term became associated with “screaming in anger” (mbengok, nepsu) as a sign of refusal (mogok). In contemporary Indonesian usage, mangkrak signifies “a condition of being uncared for; abandoned,” suggesting the agency of particular actors whose (in)actions—or refusals—cause a project to cease functioning. The term today embodies a mixture of affect and temporality, combining “anger” with “abandonment,” and appears not only as an adjective but also as a verb, meaning “delayed” (tertangguh, tertunda).
Combining past and present definitions, this panel broadens mangkrak to infrastructure projects entangled with technical engineering, political economy, labor, hope, and the temporalities of capitalism. Inspired by Bruno Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology (1996), we inquire on the situatedness of mangkrak, as it was told in Aramis, where projects seem to stall and never reach a point of completion. This raises the philosophical question: what shapes mangkrak in Indonesia, and how does it oscillate between fiction and reality? In dialogue with Guma (2020) on incompleteness, Carse and Kneas (2019), Hult (1992), and Kurniawan et al. (2024) on unbuilt infrastructures, and Furlong (2014) on momentum, the panel interrogates the temporalities and affects in stalled, malfunctioning, or partially realized projects, making visible the infrastructural agencies which refuse materialization (Prabaharyaka, 2025).
We argue that mangkrak is not solely a technological issue but a socio-technical matter of concern/care connecting government, industry, and individuals through documents and meetings which may be co-functioning or even conflicting .
Thus, by centering mangkrak, this panel contributes to contemporary anthropological debates, examining the intersection of science, engineering, society, and ecology, and challenging established definitions of ruins, failures, and abandoned infrastructures produced by Global North scholars (Gordillo, 2014; Harms, 2016; Stoler, 2013). This panel also opened the conversation on how Indonesian ethnography should deal with STS studies. Using the lens of STS (Science and Technology Studies) and ethnography, the panel contributes on two perspectives for this panel:
Science and Engineering: Moving beyond holistic, Malinowskian contextualization that attributes mangkrak to “culture,” “state,” or “national systems,” this approach draws on Marilyn Strathern’s notion of “internal contextualizations” and Donna Haraway’s concept of situated visions. Mangkrak emerges when heterogeneous entities—architecture, technical systems, payment mechanisms, workers, materials, contractors, developers, and machines—fail to function together, such as when they are in conflict from the outset, or they might be designed to doom since the beginning.
Culture, Society, and Politics: Technical uncertainties are intensified when intersecting with political and economic pressures, ecological conditions, and local social habits. Infrastructure projects translate social and economic needs, intersecting with corruption, collusion, and nepotism. From an anthropological lens, mangkrak reflects instability among actors, shifting interests, and problems of technical and administrative control.
The panel addresses key questions: To what extent do technical reasons contribute to mangkrak? How do developers, engineers, and societies tolerate stalled projects? Why are some projects physically completed but never operated? How do clashing interests among government, developers, banks, and buyers lead to mangkrak? How does mangkrak permanently transform ecology? Why do technology transfer problems in Indonesia produce mangkrak?
Proposed Panel Format:
Roundtable – This panel will feature three speakers who plan to present and discuss their work on mangkrak through anthropology and STS approaches. The roundtable format encourages interactive discussion among participants, emphasizing comparative insights from ethnography, socio-technical analysis, and infrastructural studies.
The roundtable discussion consist of:
Hatib A Kadir, is a middle researcher at KITLV (Royal Netherlands of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) will do the presentation on the hundreds of mangkrak housing public subsidy of Million House Program (Satu Juta Rumah Subsidy) in Sorong, West Papua.
Indrawan Prabaharyaka is a researcher studying ecological transformations in urban spaces, notably in Indonesia and Germany. He has been active in collaborative fieldwork through transdisciplinary encounters, co-producing textual and more-than-textual works, participating in exhibitions in Jakarta and Berlin together with the artistic research collective, Labtek Apung.
Pratama Yudha Pradheksa, PhD candidate in Department of STS, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute/ Guest Research Associate at CSEAS, Kyoto University. He will present the technosolutionism fallacy: The Intermediate Treatment Facility (ITF) in Sunter, Jakarta
References:
Carse, Ashley. 2019. “Unbuilt and Unfinished.” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 10, no. 1 (2019): 9–28. https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2019.100102
Gordillo, Gastón R. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Kurniawan, Vindi Andi, Pratama Yudha Pradheksa, and Rahmat Fauzi Saleh. 2024. “The Failure of Micro-Hydro Technology: A Case Study of the Banyubiru Project in Central Java, Indonesia.” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Transition 5 (August): 100081. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rset.2024.100081.
Furlong, Kathryn. 2014. “STS beyond the ‘modern infrastructure ideal’: Extending Theory by
Engaging with Infrastructure Challenges in the South.” Technology in Society 38 (August): 139–147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2014.04.001
Harms, Erik. Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016
Hult, Jan. 1992. “The Itera Plastic Bicycle.” Social Studies of Science 22, no. 2 (April): 373–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631292022002011
Latour, Bruno. 1996. Aramis, or the Love of Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mohácsi, Gábor, and Atsuro Morita. 2013. “Traveling Comparisons: Ethnographic Reflections on Science and Technology.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 7, no. 2: 175–183.
Morita, Atsuro. 2013. “The Ethnographic Machine: Experimenting with Context and Comparison in Strathernian Ethnography.” Science, Technology, & Human Values.
Prabaharyaka, Indrawan. 2025. “Objectified but not Materialized Theory: Human Waste Diagrams Under Erasure.” Journal of Material Culture 30, no. 1
Stoler, Ann Laura. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
Dictionary:
https://kbbi.kemendikdasmen.go.id/entri/mangkrak
https://www.sastra.org/leksikon