Jamu Stories

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• published: 05 May 2015
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Jamu Stories shows places where jamu medicine emerges in the everyday life of Yogyakarta and its surroundings, in the Island of Java, Indonesia. Jamu practices are followed during the month of Ramadan in 2013 as they unfold in homes, streets, spas, clinics, markets, gardens and cafés through diverse layouts of Javanese, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist and scientific heritage. The film is oriented through a rhizomatic phenomenological approach in anthropology that attunes attention to the space improvised between plants and people with hopes in healing or in maintaining and pursuing healthy lives. Numerous women prepare between 4 to 9 elixirs on a daily basis through rolling, pounding and pressing rhizomes, barks, fruits and spices in repetitive rythmic sounds and movements. A yellow-orange stain left on the hands from pressing curcumas and tamarind attest to the freshness and authenticity of their jamu, also insuring their clients that it contains no chemicals. Others mix training in martial arts or studies in agrotourism to improvise a new jamu-becoming or line of flight. The objective of the film is to show how plant-human proximities through cohabitation and deepened knowledge in aims to heal, passes through a molecular-becoming, or enmeshment between human and plant life forms, that is often fortuitious. The film shows 9 'jamu stories', beginning with a traditional jamu café run according to a fifth generation jamu tradition that emerged in link to the Sultan of Yogya. Stories 2 through 5 traces how jamu is made in homes, how it is carried to the streets on the back (jamu gendong), by bicycle or sold in a semi-permanent stall. The film afterwards moves to Malioboro market where many of the rhizomes, plants, fruits, barks and spices used to prepare the beverages are sold, making up the sixth story. The seventh story introduces a well known dukun in Yogyakarta and the ways he prepares jamu for clients visiting him in his clinic. The eighth story shows how jamu appears in a women’s spa and the ninth story moves to the outskirts of Yogya, near Merapi volcano to show how these practices take on new life forms in agrotourism.