Paper short abstract:

Jamu medicine is an everyday practice of preparing fresh plant elixirs. I argue that knowledge is within the very bodily processes (movements, sounds and rhythms) involved in transforming fresh vegetal matter into liquid form to fit with fluid Javanese bodies of winds and flows.

Paper long abstract:

Numerous people in Yogyakarta engage in everyday practices of preparing fresh plant elixirs as part of jamu medicine. First, I explore the particular 'praktognosia' as the processes (movements, sounds and rhythms) involved in transforming fresh vegetal matter into liquid form to fit with fluid Javanese bodies of winds and flows. Second, I reflect from the colorful yellow-orange javanese turmeric root (temulawak) as it tints elixirs, the hands that press it as well as the practice of jamu as a whole. Third, I reflect more broadly on how people-plant synergies and alignments within these forms of medicine can be understood as both enlivening perception in continuously new ways as well as grounding human-plant becomings in a complex rhizome vibrating on itself and thus providing a somewhat steady state or 'plateau' that, once we abstract it, we can call 'culture'. Through the lived experiences of moving along with plants, I thus aim to show how these very experiences both do and transform healthy bodies. I also want to explore what happens to these meaningful experiences when the movement in-between humans and plants is obstructed, interrupted or modified, whether it be with blenders, distant regulations or gloved hands in laboratory settings.