Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia

Abstract

Jamu is a lively practice of mashing, pounding, and rolling fresh plants into healing beverages that has been going on for centuries in various islands of the Indian Ocean. My anthropological study pays attention to the ways it is done in Yogyakarta and its peripheries. Java and the practice of jamu are situated in the scientific literature and a Javanese notion of rasa is introduced as a lens for the intimate ways people and plants, as open bodies of winds and flows, can interweave. Rhythmic movements, gestures, and stained yellow hands obtained through pressing turmeric and tamarind indicate deepened engagements with vegetal life found to be done through all sorts of animist, Hindu-Buddhist, Islamic, and scientific lines permeating the island. How deleuzoguattarian rhizomatic thinking further enables to understand jamu as becoming-plant is discussed as well as offered as a way to take people-environment entanglements seriously in a much broader sense.