Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Plants and
Health
New Perspectives on the Health-
Environment-Plant Nexus
Ethnobiology
Series Editors
Robert Voeks
John Richard Stepp
The case studies collected here are concerned with the theme of plants, humans, and
health from anthropological perspectives. The genesis for this volume was a session
entitled, “Plants & Health: Producing Anthropologies at the Human-Environment-
Health Nexus,” at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting held
in Washington D.C. in November 2014. During the session, and spilling into the rest
of the afternoon, we engaged in lengthy conversations about the connections
between our ethnographic research and the importance of this type of research at
this moment in time. Since the conference, we have toiled with these topics further,
pushed deeper into our own research, grappled with various theoretical perspec-
tives, refined the case studies (and even added some new ones).
This volume showcases current ethnographic accounts of the ways that people
use plants to promote human health and well-being. The goal in this volume is to
highlight some contemporary examples of how plants are central to various aspects
of healthy environments and healthy minds and bodies. The authors employ diverse
analytic frameworks, including interpretive and constructivist, political-ecological,
systems theory, phenomenological, and critical studies of the human-environment-
state interactions. The case studies represent a wide range have of geographies and
contemplate a range of the health appeals that plants and herbs.
The volume begins by considering how plants may intrinsically be “healthful”
and the notion that ecosystem health may be a literal concept deployed in contem-
porary efforts to increase awareness of environmental degradation. The characteris-
tics of specific plant species, and the role of specific species in ecosystems, are
significant for socially-attuned conservation. Thinking more about the relationships
between the individual and the plants, the production of herbal and plant-based
remedies may be therapeutic for the producer who has the advantages of experienc-
ing the plants through the various stages of product production. An example of a
woman who produces medicinal plant remedies highlights the apparent embodi-
ment of the healthful attributes of the plant-based remedies she makes and sells. The
volume continues with the exploration of the ways in which medically pluralistic
societies demonstrate the entanglements of state and citizen. In other examples, we
v
vi Preface
find that profit-driven models of extraction and production of medicinal plant prod-
ucts can be related to health sovereignty for the state and perhaps also for individu-
als. Several of the chapters in this volume work to unpack the epistemologies of
medicinal plant knowledge and the globalization of medicinal plant knowledge. The
translocal and global networks of medicinal plant knowledge are pivotal to produc-
tions of medicinal and herbal plant remedies that are used by people in all varieties
of societies and cultural groups. Humans produce health through various means and
interact with our environments, especially plants, in order to promote health.
Creating this volume has been a wonderful collaboration between the various
authors, editors, and reviewers. A number of individuals have helped bring this col-
lection of ethnographies together. We’d especially like to thank the supportive team
at Springer, Eric Stannard and Hemalatha Gunasekaran, along with their colleagues.
Our deep appreciation also extends to the reviewers, both anonymous and other-
wise, who have read and commented on various versions and drafts of the chapters.
Finally, thank you to the authors who have come along on this journey and have
worked through multiple iterations of their contributions to provide great insights
into the arena of Plants and Health.
vii
Contents
Index.................................................................................................................. 171
ix
About the Editors
xi
xii About the Editors
research methods, GIS and land use change, and the anthropology of climate
change. He is also involved in documentary and ethnographic film production on
topics both related and unrelated to his primary research. He is the founding editor
of the Journal of Ecological Anthropology and former editor-in-chief of the Journal
of Ethnobiology. Along with Robert Voeks, he serves as an Ethnobiology series editor
for Springer.
Contributors
xiii
Traditional and Nontraditional Medicine
in a Yucatec Maya Community
Eugene N. Anderson
Introduction
The Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula maintain an herbal medical tradition that is
demonstrably very old. The people in question are the original “Maya,” those who
call themselves Maayah. With the extension of that word to cover the whole lan-
guage phylum, the language in question is now known as Yucatec (a Spanish word;
the pseudo-Indigenous form “Yukatek” is incorrect). They were the builders of the
northern lowlands cities such as Chichen Itza. How far south they extended into the
central lowlands in Classic times is unknown; somewhere in the southern peninsula
they gave way to their linguistic relatives the Cholans.
Depictions in pre-Columbian art show some of the plants now used medici-
nally, and show rituals that may include curing ones (personal observation of art
in many sites and museums). Documents from the Spanish Conquest onward
speak of it and show that the major herbs have been used at least since that time.
These documents include very good dictionaries, notably the quite early Calepino
de Motul (Arzápalo Marín 1996, orig. ca. 1600). Other sources include the aston-
ishing Ritual of the Bacabs (Arzápalo Marín 1987; Roys 1965), an early Maya
text in Spanish letters that details a series of rituals involving mystical and reli-
gious references to many animals and plants, several of them now used in curing;
also the Book of the Jew, an eighteenth-century herbal-medical text (Barrera
Marin and Barrera Vasquez 1983). With the modern age came extensive ethnobo-
tanical research on the Maya, beginning with Ralph Roys’ classic Ethno-Botany
of the Maya (1976 [1931]) and continuing through the foundational work of
Alfredo Barrera Vásquez and his son Alfredo Barrera Marín (Barrera Marín et al.
1976) to subsequent research climaxing in the definitive work of Arellano et al.,
listing 2166 species (Arellano Rodriguez et al. 2003).
Maya medicine can be divided into naturalistic and personalistic theories (Foster
1994), but the division is fuzzy. Naturalistic medicine, in George Foster’s terms,
involves causation by natural things: insect stings, sunstroke, thorn stabs, animal
bites, and the like. Personalistic causation involves active cause by a god, evil spirit,
witch, or other entity working ill. The Maya are not always clear about causation.
More, their major causal category is “wind,” ik’, which can be either a normal natu-
ral wind or an evil spirit that appears only as a rush of air, and such spirits can be
mindlessly harmful or mindfully malevolent.
My research was carried out between 1989 and 2007 in eastern Quintana Roo,
primarily in Chunhuhub but also in the nearby towns of Polyuc, Xpichil, Presidente
Juarez, Margaritas, and others. These are agricultural towns, growing maize, vege-
tables, and fruit, and raising cattle and small livestock. Agriculture was an intensive
form of the classic milpa (swidden) system, with maize the staple food and a vast
variety of plants and animals either raised in the fields or taken in the highly man-
aged forests. The area was at that time quite prosperous by rural Mexican standards,
and lands were still held collectively under the ejido system. This has eroded since
2000, and private property is now general (Anderson and Anderson 2012). A
national law passed in 1993 allowed ejidos to privatize, but those in central Quintana
Roo were slow to do it; Chunhuhub did not even begin to break up its ejido land-
holding system until 2005, and after that privatization proceeded gradually.
My research focused on ethnobiology, including agriculture, forest management,
and traditional medicine (Anderson 2003, 2005, 2010a, 2010b, 2011, 2013;
Anderson and Medina Tzuc 2005). In addition to widespread questioning of people
from all walks of life, I worked intensively with two hmeen (traditional healers and
ritual specialists), Don Marcos Puc Batab of Presidente Juarez and Don José Cauich
Canul of Polyuc. They were very different individuals. Don Marcos was extremely
traditional, essentially monolingual in Maya, and also a darkly saturnine person.
Don José was friendly, outgoing, eager to teach, fluent in Spanish, and highly eclec-
tic in his curing.
In and around Chunhuhub, I recorded 350 herbal substances (almost all plants,
but a few animals) used medicinally. This compares well with the 360 recorded by
Ankli (Ankli 2000; Ankli et al. 1999a, 1999b) and with the few hundred medicinally
used that are listed in Arellano Rodriguez et al. (2003).
Yucatec Maya medicine is well described. Robert Redfield and Margaret Park
Redfield recorded an astonishing amount of data about it in the 1920s and on
through the 1950s. In particular, their work in the town of Dzitas is a neglected gem
Traditional and Nontraditional Medicine in a Yucatec Maya Community 3
More clearly personalistic are sicknesses sent as punishment by gods and saints
(again a fusion of Maya and Renaissance Spanish ideas) and the very, very many
sicknesses sent by witches. Witchcraft (brujería) and witches (brujos/as) apparently
abound in the Yucatan, as noted by the Redfields and other observers. They usually
send chronic, especially chronic but intermittent, conditions. They may be way,
“transformers,” who appear as goats or other animals. They work their evil espe-
cially on Tuesdays and Fridays. This is a purely Spanish reckoning that goes back
to Roman paganism: those were the days of Mars and Venus, troublesome and
unlucky deities. Thus, anti-witch charms also are often best done on those days.
Finally, more ordinary, less harmful magic can be worked by ordinary people, as
when a love-stricken youth tries to sprinkle dried and powdered hummingbird or
flycatcher head in his girlfriend’s hair to make her love him. This widespread bit of
Mexican folklore may have reached the Yucatec after the Spanish Conquest though
the identification of hummingbird with love and flycatchers with passion is appar-
ently very ancient.
Imperfectly blended with all this are varying degrees of knowledges of outside
medical traditions. Most important, naturally, is biomedicine—specifically, the
form of it taught and used in clinics in Quintana Roo, which runs largely to shots,
antibiotic pills and salves, aspirin and other mild analgesics, and necessary surgical
interventions in cases of difficult childbirth, major accidents, cancer, and the like.
Not only the concepts of germs and infection have been learned; more important in
most people’s lives is the coming of awareness of diabetes and its alleged origin
from eating sweets and overly processed foods. As in so many other parts of the
world, diabetes has gone from virtually unknown to rampantly abundant in Maya
towns in the last two generations, as comida chatarra (“junk food”) replaces whole-
grain maize and nutrient-rich vegetables in the diet.
In 2007, a fully stocked and beautifully appointed clinic came to Chunhuhub,
and modern biomedicine has swept the town (Anderson and Anderson 2012). The
other communities of my research do not have such facilities, but they can come to
Chunhuhub. Traditional midwifery is all but dead; hmeen lore is being forgotten.
Don Marcos and Don José have taught their sons, but their sons are active in other
realms too, and do not preserve all the old knowledge. Younger people rely more
and more on biomedicine, less and less on traditional healing, every generation now.
Family herbal medicine continues, however, because it is cheaper, easier to
access, and often more effective than the medicine from the clínica. My work has
had a modest share in this, since the herbal medical data in my 2003 book was
drawn on by a group of local healers during the brief career of their natural-medicine
clinic (Marín Martínez et al. 2008). It flourished briefly, providing good herbal
products, massage, and the service of one of the parteras, but local residents knew
the herbal medicine well enough to prevent the clinic from making a living.
Biomedicine is not the only external influence, however. Folk medicine from all
over Mexico and some parts of the Caribbean is available. Spiritualism, in the ver-
sion introduced to Mexico especially by Allan Kardek in the nineteenth century, is
known in the towns, and is an indirect but important influence on Don José Cauich
Canul. Conspicuously absent from Mayaland are the botánicas (traditional herbal
Traditional and Nontraditional Medicine in a Yucatec Maya Community 5
and spiritualist stores) so extremely abundant elsewhere in Mexico, but anyone vis-
iting a large city has access to them; they supply spiritual and spiritualist remedies,
and herbal remedies from all over Mexico.
The most striking thing about Maya medicine is that in practice these varied
theories of disease have little effect. They have, in most cases, limited relevance
because the Maya have learned empirically over thousands of years which herbs
actually work for which conditions.
Thus, for instance, the fact that a skin rash may be due to a plant’s itchy hairs or
leaf oils or to a bad wind striking the skin or to drinking cold liquid when over-
heated has little effect on the treatment; what does matter is that if it is a simple itch
like a mosquito bite, it can be treated by tea of bark of chakmoolche’ (Erythrina
standleyana, extremely tannin-rich). Other tannin-rich barks are used to make skin
washes, and apparently work reasonably well. Skin sores and rashes that hurt and
continue without clearing up are treatable by k’anaan (Hamelia patens, which has
an antibiotic in its leaves; Arvigo and Balick 1993:143); its virtues were already
noted in the early Yucatec/Spanish dictionary Calepino de Motul around 1600
(Arzápalo Marín 1996:409). Similarly, infected rashes and other infections can be
treated by siipche’ (Bunchosia swartziana). Anita Ankli found this tree contains a
very effective antibiotic (Ankli 2000; Ankli et al. 1999a, 1999b). Ankli also found
medicinal values in many other Maya healing plants. More have turned up subse-
quently. Still others need more study. (See also Berlin and Berlin 1996; Berlin et al.
2000, for the highland Tzeltal and Tzotzil, linguistic relatives of the Yucatec but
inhabiting a quite different ecosystem.)
Worms are treated with epazote (Chenopodium ambrosioides), which is highly
effective. Canker sores (fogajes) are effectively treated by a mash of the root of oon
ak’ (Gouania lupuloides); the root sap contains a soothing and drying chemical
(apparently a saponin; personal observation). Kakaltun (wild basil, Ocimum micran-
thum) works well for stomach aches. Diabetes is effectively treated by tea of buds
of Cecropia, by eating nopales (Opuntia spp.), by tea of certain grasses, and other
local foods. The bark of chakah (Bursera simaruba) makes a tea effective as a skin
wash for rashes caused by contact with chechem (Metopium brownei), a huge tree
closely related to poison ivy and having the same irritant capacities. The abundant
ha’abin (Piscidia piscipula) has bark and roots with toxic compounds and also tan-
nins, and the bark is rasped to make a rash for skin infections, for which it is very
effective, with strong antibiotic action (Ankli 2000).
Arnica (here Tithonia spp.) is used, as elsewhere, in a tea or alcohol infusion
for bruises, skin infections, arthritis, and other pains, as well as itching and mange.
Box elemuy (Malmea depressa), used so widely that it is smuggled up to Maya in
Los Angeles, seems to be effective for kidney medicine (Salvador Flores Guido,
personal communication), but confirmation is needed. Chaya (Cnidoscolus chaya-
mansa) is an effective diuretic. Of several apparently effective stomach-ache rem-
edies, allspice (Pimenta dioica, a fairly common native tree) is known in
biomedicine to be effective. The irritating, pungent, somewhat toxic sap of
euphorbia (notably hobon k’ak’, E. heterophylla) is put on skin and eye infections
and the like.
6 E.N. Anderson
1
See my posting “The Morality of Ethnobiology” on my web site www.krazykioti.com for the
Maya case and its relationship to the general question.
Traditional and Nontraditional Medicine in a Yucatec Maya Community 7
Medicines are normally administered boiled into teas. These teas are used internally
for respiratory and stomach conditions and other internal problems. They are used
externally, as washes, for rashes, fevers, overheating, and the like. They are used as
full-scale baths for fever, genital conditions, and some other conditions. Plants can
also be dried, powdered, and taken as powder or capsules; veteran healers like Don
José know that drying changes the effect of some plants. Herbs can be mixed into
oils for salves, or made into poultices for wounds and sores. Rubbing medicine into
the skin is possible, and herbs can be used in massage; Maya curers are superb
masseuses.
Some herbs can cure with touch alone, as when bunches of siipche’ leaves are
used to tap and then brush down a person to clear away evil influences. (The herbal
brushdown is a very widespread but little studied Native American healing method.)
Sometimes contact is not necessary; the ya’axhalalche’ mentioned above need only
be planted in the yard near the front door to keep away evil winds.
The above account presents the bare bones of the system—the knowledge that
any reasonably competent Maya householder would share. Beyond this come a
wide range of variations. Don Marcos is strictly traditional, using only what he
learned from elders and from experience. Don José is totally eclectic, combining a
phenomenal knowledge of traditional herbal medicine and massage with a lifetime
of working experience and also with patent medicines, modern biomedicine (he
tells people to get their shots), magic (learned from travels to central Mexico),
prophecy (a tradition in Quintana Roo), and sheer wild experimentation. I have no
idea what possessed him to try an armadillo baked in an earth oven with 40 limes as
a treatment for diabetes, but he says it had some effect; it is certainly not a tradi-
tional Maya cure. Other hmeen of my acquaintance were somewhere in between,
10 E.N. Anderson
fairly eclectic but generally following traditions, including those documented in the
old literature.
On a less expert scale, my Maya friends are always trying new herbal formulas,
new biomedical treatments, and new ideas about food, health, and lifestyle. No one
I have ever known is more prone to experiment. The basic tenets of the system
remain quite stable in people of the older generation, but young people combine a
smattering of Maya lore with an increasing knowledge of biomedicine and public
health, derived from the rapidly improving clinic and hospital situation in the Zona
Maya as well as from public schools.
This all presents a picture of rapid change, but not random change, and not a
simple case of modernization and globalization overwhelming tradition. Maya
medicine was a well-structured (if simple) system of scientific theories and hypoth-
eses, “incorrect” by biomedical standards but serving well to organize Maya knowl-
edge. It is flexible and dynamic enough to incorporate biomedical techniques, cures,
and even theories without collapsing. This is especially true since biomedicine as it
is seen in Quintana Roo has little to say about many common problems, ranging
from diabetes and cancer to mental illness. Biomedicine can rarely cure these, and
folk remedies are not wholly ineffective, so Maya medicine stands.
This leads me to a position somewhere between structuralism and poststructural-
ism. Structuralism, whether the Levi-Straussian form or the form seen in the litera-
ture on cognitive models and cultural models, postulates more rigid, cut-and-dried,
frozen structures than those observed. But the situation is not chaotic. Traditional
structures and models accommodate new ideas, and whole new cultural models can
be incorporated happily into the medical system.
These are not even necessarily biomedical models; Don José incorporates spir-
itualism and Hispano-Mexican magic with his practice, and sees no problems
with doing so; not only do the procedures work (for him), but they work by
unknown and unseen forces, comparable to the ik’ of traditional Maya belief.
Germs, too, are unseen but apparently agentive beings, either k’as ik’ or very
similar. So a unique belief system of a quite original healer can be seen as one
instantiation of the dynamic, shifting, open, but well structured and well-theo-
rized system that is Maya medicine. The plants have their actual powers, and thus
are real parties in the interaction, and for at least some Maya the plants are active
agents. I thus see Maya medical practice as a summation of complex interactions
and encounters with nonhuman, but in a way active, beings that are part of their
world. This brings me to a viewpoint quite similar to that of Bruno Latour (2004)
and his “actor-network theory.”
In all this, Maya medicine is like biomedicine. International biomedical science
has the same history of developing a framework (largely established by Koch and
Pasteur) and then accommodating individual variations, new knowledge, new
approaches, and even whole new paradigms—“incommensurable” in Thomas
Kuhn’s terms (Kuhn 1962) they may have been, but incorporated they were anyway.
Bringing germ theory, post-Liebig nutritional science, and medical genetics under
one tent would seem impossible to a dogmatic Kuhnian, but it happened, and even
substantial amounts of Chinese medicine have been incorporated into biomedicine.
Traditional and Nontraditional Medicine in a Yucatec Maya Community 11
If the only measure that matters is that the patient gets well (or dies), “incommen-
surability” on the theory front soon gets resolved.
As almost everyone since Kuhn has pointed out, science is a messier and more
open process than he thought, but it does have structures, models, theories,
approaches, viewpoints, and other identifiable systems of thought and practice (on
all things scientific see Kitcher 1993). We may not find evil winds to fit with current
biomedical knowledge, but then much of the biomedical wisdom of my childhood
is just as dead now. Kuhn was right in his basic point: science advances by discard-
ing over-aged theories.
However, this is not the end of the story. If biased perception and deluded infer-
ence were all that mattered, the “strong program” in science studies would be cor-
rect, and all knowledge and belief about the world would be arbitrary guesswork. In
that case, we could never choose nourishing foods, avoid cars, stay out of the hot
sun, or cure ourselves. Demonstrably, people have learned to survive in a very dif-
ficult and dangerous world, and that survival requires an enormous body of verified
and thus verifiable knowledge.
This knowledge comes initially from experience. Old books speak of “trial
and error,” but it is unlikely that people try new medicines without any prior
sense of what to look for. Any innate tendencies left over from our primate past,
including, for example, our fondness for sweets, have some guiding function.
Built-up cultural experience also guides interaction. For example, many or most
cultures share an idea that bitter-tasting plants are apt to have strong physiologi-
cal effects, and many have learned that minty plants are apt to be medicinal
(Moerman 1986, 1998).
The Maya are used to seeing tree bark as medicinal, and thus look to bark for
cures. Yucatan trees often adapt to a dry tropical climate by depositing large amounts
of tannins in the bark, and these often have a soothing and clearing effect on skin
conditions, hence the generalization. I believe, but have not confirmed, that bark is
specifically sought out for new cures. Herbs are; new plants in Mayaland often
come with reputations for healing, and whether they do or not, they will be tried out,
and used if they seem to have an effect. Maya medicine is highly traditional, but it
is an open system, perfectly capable of incorporating new medicines and new
approaches. Tradition does not mean stagnation.
This is, in large part, because one of the firm traditions of Maya medicine is
empiricism. The Maya rule is to try anything that might work, keep using it if it
seems to work even occasionally, and drop it only if it is either actively harmful or
too expensive to be cost-effective. This keeps in play many remedies that seem to
have very minimal effect, but the stated idea in response to questioning is that they
may work sometime for someone, and probably have done so. Conversely, it leads
to a search for cheaper alternatives to cures that are, or become, expensive.
Since the medicine is basically empirical, the fact that Yucatec Maya medical
theory underdetermines the knowledge of botanicals is not surprising. It is true of
biomedicine too. Until recent advances in genetics and cell biology; until the last
several years, we had no idea how antibiotics killed bacteria or why olive oil seemed
to be associated with longevity. Theory lags behind experience. Biomedicine can
now predict that certain families of drugs will probably all, or mostly, work, but
much remains to be learned. The Maya can predict that barks and aromatic leaves
are good places to look though they do not know the mechanisms involved. Inferring
what is in the “black box” between trying a leaf and evaluating its medicinal benefit
is not an easy task even for a modern lab scientist.
It is therefore quite reasonable to understand Maya medicine in its own terms on
the basis of its own theories, and also to understand its empirical values in the light
of modern biomedicine. It is also perfectly reasonable to assess Maya medicine in
the light of Chinese traditional medicine, as done in a quite brilliant tour-de-force
Traditional and Nontraditional Medicine in a Yucatec Maya Community 13
by García et al. (1999). These are not closed systems, they are not static, they are not
culture bound, and they are not “incommensurable” in the way that matters, i.e., in
their effect on people. They cure or they don’t. Either the skin sore rapidly dries up
and disappears or it doesn’t.
Conclusion
Looking at the context of Maya medicine helps understand its theories. As noted,
the focus on hot/cold and on cold winds is clearly related to the prevalence of fevers,
chills, and hypothermia (over time from chronic illness, or in the short term from
hyponatremia or cold rain). It seems reasonable to extend the recognition that stom-
ach cramps come from drinking cold liquid when overheated, and assume that simi-
lar pains in the knee or ankle come from cold winds striking overheated limbs.
Other traditional explanations in Maya medicine run either to direct, simple, observ-
able cause-and-effect (broken bones, stings, bites, and the like) or to spiritual causes:
bad winds, punishing deities, evil magic worked by wizards, or bad influences from
ill-omened beings in the natural world. The latter causes are invoked for long-
running conditions with no obvious explanation and no very credible hot/cold etiol-
ogy, especially mental conditions. Mental conditions are rather effectively treated
by good advice, help from elders, massages, and rough-and-ready but quite good
psychotherapy by sensitive healers. (I have some training and experience in lay
psychotherapy and was struck by how well some hmeen parallel good therapists in
the United States. Don José, in particular, questioned his patients sensitively and in
proper psychotherapeutic manner about their lives, and designed cures with their
answers fully in mind.)
All these theories of sickness are simple, straightforward, and reasonable. They
are especially clearly resonant with the ontology of the Maya, which sees a world
where everything has its spirits that take care of it and guard it, and where every-
thing has winds (both real and spiritual) constantly blowing back and forth over and
through it. Spirits, including spirit winds, can be good, bad, neutral, or changeable
with circumstances, like humans. Since temperature variations are associated with
winds, not only in Maya thought but in meteorological science, it makes sense to
associate winds with chills and fevers. It seems likely that the Maya once thought
all plants had spirits, and the values of the useful ones were due to spirits that had
effective engagements with humanity.
The clearest difference between Maya medicine and biomedicine is that the
former is based on an ontology in which spirits exist and in which many winds are
agentive beings with a certain amount of will. Whether evil winds are conscious
or not, let alone persons or not, is unclear, but they do have enough agency to
work damage.
In Yucatec Maya ontology, the cosmos is a highly dynamic, constantly changing
place, where grand forces are apt to be as dynamically shifting as the daily weather.
All this takes place over a deeper structural stability provided by the directions
14 E.N. Anderson
(symbolized by color), the stars and planets, the earth, and the innate qualities of
extant beings (see García et al. 1999; Sosa 1985; and the cited Redfield publications
for the full ontology behind Maya medicine).
Anthropologists have learned over time to take traditional ontologies seriously.
Understanding them is necessary for any real understanding the people and cultures
that hold them, but, also, they have a great deal to offer when taken seriously as
philosophies. Recent work on tropical Native American ontologies by such research-
ers as Eduardo Kohn (2013, 2015) and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2016) add much
to our understanding, and are very useful in interpreting Yucatec Maya culture,
which has clear ties to the cultures they study as well as to North American
Indigenous worldviews.
This Mayan ontology is based on direct experience and is a pragmatic and
realistic one. Whatever the outsider may think of the gods and spirits postulated,
they are reasonable black-box assumptions to explain the often unpredictable
changes in the world. They are not modern science, but they are at least as reason-
able as the black-box assumptions of early modern science, from phlogiston and
aether to Freudian psychodynamics, the “selfish gene,” and, of course, the hot/
cold medical theory that the west broadly shared with the Maya and which has by
no means been totally replaced by the germ theory. Both the Maya theories and
the now-abandoned western ones had a history, grounding them firmly in wider
belief and knowledge systems within their respective societies. Theories about
black-box variables tend to reflect the society that produced them, not the real
thing in the black box. This is natural, and one reason why we always need scien-
tific advancement.
The main conclusion of this project is that the Maya believe in the effective-
ness of their herbal medicines because their herbal medicines are effective—or, at
worst, look, smell, or taste like medicines that are effective. Reality matters.
Ontology does, after all, concern itself with reality, and thus go beyond the
extreme “social construction” positions of the 1990s. Eduardo Kohn “argue[s]
that the best way to reconfigure anthropology’s relationship to language is through
the ethnographic study of how humans communicate [or interact] with a whole
host of nonhuman beings in a world that is itself communicative but not symbolic
or linguistic” (Kohn 2015:315).
All the different ontologies in the world have to deal with the fact that a day
working without salt can be fatal, or that a tea made from a certain bark can
instantly and thoroughly relieve the maddening itch of chigger and mosquito
bites. Whether it does this because of complex tannin molecules, powerful tree
spirits, good winds, or saintly blessings, the point is that it works. Understanding
that and explaining it in detail is a worthwhile goal of science and of the study of
traditional ontologies.
Acknowledgements All gratitude to the people of Chunhuhub, Polyuc, Presidente Juarez, and
neighboring towns, and especially to Don José Cauich Canul, Aurora Dzib Xihum de Cen, Don
Felix Medina Tzuc, and Don Marcos Puc Batab; also to Barbara Anderson.
Traditional and Nontraditional Medicine in a Yucatec Maya Community 15
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Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia
Julie Laplante
Introduction
Another way of putting this… is to think of ourselves not as beings but as becomings—that is, not
as discrete and pre-formed entities but as trajectories of movement and growth.
Ingold 2013: 8
J. Laplante (*)
School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies, University of Ottawa,
Ottawa, ON, Canada
e-mail: Julie.Laplante@uottawa.ca
Indonesia with people and plants involved in a lively everyday practice called jamu.1
Jamu is the mashing of fresh plants into healing beverages, a practice that has been
going on for centuries in various islands of the Indian Ocean. Java gives onto the
Indian Ocean to the South and onto the Java Sea to the North, with Borneo on the
horizon. With its neighboring islands, Sumatra to the West and Bali to the East, Java
shares Malayo-Polynesian ancestralities. Contemporary Javanese thrive through
these animistic histories and presents, through time entangling with Ayurvedic
Hindu-Buddhist, Islamic, Taoist, colonial biomedical histories and presents. With
the exceptional fertility and rainfall of the island giving rich vegetal life all year
round, the practice of jamu continues to emerge through both new and old
“traditions.”2 It is within these lively contexts that I propose a way of attending to
these human-plant “zones of copresence,” learning from the open-ended ways jamu
ministers to health in the everyday.
I begin by situating Java and the practice of jamu as it broadly stands in the
scientific literature, and more specifically as it has been studied by anthropolo-
gists. In a second section, I introduce the Javanese notion of rasa as a lens for the
intimate ways people and plants, as open bodies of winds and flows, can inter-
weave. Third, I introduce the fieldwork I conducted in 2013, following the intri-
cate ways jamu is practiced in Yogyakarta (Jogja) situated in the Special District
of Yogyakarta on the island of Java in Indonesia (bordering Central Java to the
West). In the fourth section, I continue to explore diverse lines or offshoots
through which jamu is made to appear throughout the city and its peripheries. In
this picture I paint of jamu becomings, one is not to expect a taxonomical (ethno)
botanical account since this account would break up the continuously emerging
and very dynamic flows at the heart of the practice. To the contrary, jamu becom-
ings are found to be less about ingredients, plant identification-isolation and
related symptoms in a causal logic, than about successful entanglements of
human-plant movements, moods, and timing. These entanglements are what I
hope to pull out of these everyday practices. The final section explores how
deleuzoguattarian rhizomatic thinking further enables to understand jamu as
becoming-plant,3 as well as offers ways to take people-environment entangle-
ments seriously in a much broader sense.
1
The anthropological film Jamu Stories (64 min) https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=CMRZRw1z2Fw produced for this study can be watched to accompany this written
account. The research was made possible with the financial support of the Social Science and
Humanities Research Council in Canada, in collaboration with the University of New Brunswick,
the University of Ottawa and the University of Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta.
2
“Tradition” is here understood in the original sense of retracing the trails of predecessors to find
ways to carry on (Ingold 2015: 136–137).
3
See Houle and Querrien (2012) and Laplante (2015a, b, In press) on this notion. Also discussed
in the Rhizomes section of this article.
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 19
Java and Jamu
4
The kraton Ngayogyakarta (also called keraton), and that I will henceforth simply refer to as the
“kraton”, is a walled city within Jogja home to around 25,000 people of which around 1000 are
employed by the Sultan. His Majesty Sri Sultan Hamengkubuwono X is the current Sultan of the
Yogyakarta Sultanate in Indonesia, and also Governor of the modern Yogyakarta Special Region
(Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta), democratically elected in the national legislature of Indonesia in
1998. The Economist Blog. http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2012/09/yogyakartas-sul-
tans, Accessed 26 May 2016.
5
Historian Fernand Braudel supports this idea of multiple layers of religions that do not seem to
supersede one another, yet rather coexist within Javanese ways; ayurvedic ideas of Hinduism and
Buddhism brought in through merchants and sailors coming from India, for instance, seem to have
“flourished together, acclimatizing to insular ‘cultures’ and serving as support to the new king-
doms” (1993: 364).
20 J. Laplante
study of Javanese religion, keeping with the language of “complex and multilayered
culture” to refer to lively Javanese ways. More echoes of this liveliness are found 20
years earlier in Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead’s (1942) work and 30 years
later in Fredrik Barth (1993) and David Abram’s (1996) works, all studies done in
Bali, the small island East of Java.
While there are great differences in everyday life between and within these
islands, there are also numerous correspondences making the works of these
prominent anthropologists useful for supporting the approach I applied to my own
research. During my fieldwork, I visited both Bali and a Tengger village located
in the high country around Mount Bromo in East Java, known for having people
flee there to avoid converting to Islam.6 While the Tengger village appealed more
explicitly to Buddhist practices, in Bali there seemed to be a greater appeal to
practices showing Hindu influences. In both places, jamu as practiced in the
streets and markets in Jogja is much less apparent, the entanglements with vegetal
life appear in the form of prepared various vegetal offerings placed in banana
leaves in different strategic places in the cities and villages, as well as by the
ocean. In their pioneering visual anthropology study, Mead and Bateson (1942)
observed the everyday lives of a Buddhistic Brahman family in the village of
Batocan, showing yet another amalgam. They strongly caution that every village
in Bali differs from every other, with striking differences between districts, thus
showing how multiplicity prevails.
In fact, it is this very strickingly visible multiplicity that the islands have in com-
mon. The best way I found to do research with people bringing such a diversity of
histories into the present required, as Mead and Bateson had done (ibid.), to specify
that it is not about Balinese or Javanese “custom,” yet more directly “about the way
in which they, as living persons, moving, standing, eating, sleeping, dancing, and
going into trance, embody that abstraction which (after we have abstracted it) we
technically call culture” (ibid: xii). Mead and Bateson (ibid.) thus take a step back,
beginning in the flow rather than with a pre-existing abstraction such as a ready-
made culture. It is perhaps the liveliness and rich aesthetics of everyday life in Bali
that led them to be interested in “culture in the making” and to conduct one of the
first works of visual anthropology through the means of photography. In my work
in Java, I was also immediately drawn into the multisensorial aspects of Jogja’s
lived emplacements. I was led towards movement, gestures, and visuals as the best
way to gain a sense of the vibrant configurations made to appear in people’s
everyday lives with jamu, as something that is not hidden but very much expressed
and enacted on the surfaces in continuously newly improvised ways.
Barth offers an even more open-ended understanding of Balinese everyday life in
terms of disorder, multiplicity, and underdeterminedness (1993: 5). In a radical
move forward, Barth proposes we take the imperfect pattern, initial amorphous lack
of roles, as our beginning point, seeing how people give them different degrees of
shape. He thus suggests cultural representations are brought to the surface in vary-
ing ways, proposing an understanding of Balinese worlds through the metaphor of
6
See Hefner 1985.
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 21
7
The high cliffs of Java’s southern coast are known for disasters often attributed to the South Sea
Queen. Present-day fishermen from Java and from Bali still make a ceremony every year in her
honor to appease her temper. http://api.sg/main/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&ca
tid=57:special-articles&id=36:the-mystery-of-javas-spirit-queen, Accessed 28 June 2015.
8
It so happens that the book I was reading while doing the research is Jane Bennet’s Vibrant Matter
(2010), providing yet more echoes to this permeability in-between people and materialities that
speak so strongly to the practice of doing jamu.
22 J. Laplante
In this vein of concerns with gender issues and women’s empowerment in relation
to jamu industries in Java, several MA and PhD theses have recently been produced.9
Mangestuti et al. (2007) also offer an understanding of jamu practices as a form of
traditional medicine. This work was done through interviews, essentially to collect
recipes with 100 members of the royal family on Jamu Madura. Jamu Madura, one
of the most famous kinds of jamu in Indonesia made on Madura Island (situated on
a Northeastern tip of Java), can be traced through original records kept in palaces.
With similar aims to document and classify, Niehof (1988) suggests there are four
domains where the use of herbal medicine is prominent in Madura, namely for
minor ailments, febrile skin diseases, the field of sex and eroticism, and pregnancy
and the postpartum period. In Java, Riswan and Sangat-Roemantyo (2002) provide
an ethno-medicinal plant study, classifying jamu into five categories: medicines,
health-cares, beauty-cares (cosmetics), tonics or beverages, and those jamu con-
cerned with the body’s endurance and protection. Sangat and Larashati’s (2002)
ethnophytomedical study of jamu in West, Central, and East Java is concerned with
the ingredients of jamu as “endangered species” due to increasing demand, thus
closing up plants into species-objects as a way to preserve, conserve, and regulate
them very much as documenting recipes and classifying domains enable this
practice.
With a yet narrower interest in the biological aspects of jamu, we can also find a
number of studies interested in the transformation of jamu towards “rational” phy-
topharmacological use (Elfahmi et al. 2014), thus explicitly aiming to “know” the
plants from the outside, or more precisely through analysis of their molecular pro-
cesses. Elfahmi’s (2006) comprehensive review discusses the biological activity and
therapeutic value of the most commonly used medicinal plants (and plant constitu-
ents) in jamu. He provides this as knowledge that can be used to further develop
jamu in Indonesia in a rational way, which he equates with phytomedicine. This
move from jamu towards phytomedicines shows the potential overlaps in the ways
of healing with plants on the island, the Indonesian government itself dividing the
preparation of medicinal plants into the three categories of (1) jamu, (2) standard-
ized herbal medicines, and (3) fitofarmaka (phytomedicines). With an interest in the
phytopharmacology of plants, an earlier study by Limyati and Juniar (1998) offers
an examination of the microbiological quality of seven kinds of Jamu Gendong and
their raw materials while Roosita et al. (2008) provide a botanical survey of plant
parts used in jamu in West Java, again reinforcing a form of “rational” use. A study
by Ibrahim (1993) determines the elemental content of five traditional jamu widely
available in Malaysia, avoiding to identify the samples of common jamu he bought
from local stores, simply mentioning they were sold for general health for men,
general health for women, stomach problems, headaches, and energizing vitality.
His results suggest that commonly used traditional jamu contains several trace ele-
ments which are toxic in nature, cautioning users in their use and advocating the
need for more research of the long-term effects on jamu users. These studies explicitly
9
See for instance Szuter (2015), Ambaretnani (2012), Sinaga (2012), Krier (2011), Djen Amar
(2010), Campbel (2009), Alkaff (2006).
24 J. Laplante
show how such research leads to forms of regulation and normalization, a process
resembling continuing forms of colonization.
For my own purposes, the weakness of these more vertical approaches to under-
standing jamu is to largely disregard the broader contexts and ways jamu is made to
work not only in the synergies of their mixes but also in the synergies with the
bodies through which they pass within contexts. While these works are all informa-
tive in their own ways, they all begin with “objects” (plants, their parts, mixtures, or
molecules) as having an effect or an impact on “subjects” (humans), thus maintain-
ing a causal logic. Oddly enough, and aside from Ferzacca’s study dealing directly
with jamu in all of its complexities, a 1979 study conducted by Hull in a village near
Jogja is the most attuned to the flexibility and plurality of ways of resorting to jamu.
Her work even includes an “in-between” section alluding to the fact that some prac-
tices cannot be classified as either intrinsically helpful or harmful, and may result in
either direction. She points towards experience rather than to a desire to further
classify, abstract, and analyze from afar, a direction I aim to follow as well. For the
purpose of this inquiry, I aim, as Bateson did, to begin with imperfect patterns or
lines of becoming, thus shifting my attention to finding out what happens as living
vegetal and human forms of life correspond in the practice of jamu. This requires us
to think of ourselves and of plants, “not as discrete and preformed entities but as
trajectories of movement and growth” (Ingold 2013: 8).
Rasa
The ways the women move when making liquid plant beverages is the first aspect of
jamu I noticed. Women throw their whole bodies into the mashing, pressing, and
rolling of the herbs and rhizomes in a slow rhythmic fashion. The back and forth
motion and the importance of the hands “entering into” the fresh plant materials
also made an impression on me. According to Hugues-Freeland (1997), whose
work on dance led her to explore the notion of rasa, “Rasa informs social practice
in Java pervasively, and is analogous to the notion of rhythm or tempo in everyday
life (Bourdieu 1977: 10) and suggestive of a theoretical potential to the notion of
‘sense’” (1997: 58). While the simplest translation of rasa is “sense” or “feeling,”
“in Sanskrit, the language from which the term rasa derives, the word’s usages are
many and varied. They include the following: ‘sap,’ ‘juice,’ ‘essence,’ ‘marrow,’
‘potion,’ ‘milk,’ ‘serum,’ ‘mercury,’ ‘semen,’ ‘myrrh,’ ‘mineral,’ ‘gold,’ ‘green’
‘onion,’ ‘resin,’ ‘flavor,’ ‘the faculty of taste,’ ‘fondness,’ ‘pleasure,’ ‘aesthetic
affect,’ ‘sentiment,’ and ‘disposition’” (Monier-Williams 1979 [1899]). “Of these
‘essence,’ ‘mercury,’ ‘flavor,’ ‘the faculty of taste,’ ‘aesthetic affect,’ ‘sentiment,’
and ‘disposition’ have all been retained in modern Javanese” (Benamou 2010: 40).
In Javanese music, Benamou suggests that rasa may be translated as “sensation” or
“inner meaning,” but can also mean “the ability to express or perceive feeling or
‘inner meaning,’ or ‘the faculty through which these are perceived’ (‘intuition’).”
(ibid.) The fluidity of the word is noticeable and it points to entanglements.
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 25
10
Term from old Javanese that is perpetuated in modern Javanese (Zoetmulder 1995: 234).
Javanese traditional healers can broadly be called dhukun, defined as “healer, sorcerer, and master
of ceremony” by Geertz (1960: 86); however, De Grave adds eight nuances to the way of referring
the term dhukun: the rural kejawèn—basic value system of the activity of the javanese dhukun—,
the kejawèn priyayi, the urban or kebatinan kejawèn, traditionalist Islam, progressist Islam, radical
Islam, non-practicing Islam, and secularist, to which we need to add Christianism that, even in
minority, is well implanted in Central Java (2012: 36). In this case, Dr. Gembong is an urban
kejawèn dhukun who mixes teachings in science and in Javanese pencak silat martial arts to offer
jamu prescriptions in a city clinic.
26 J. Laplante
The Margaluyu school works to develop tenaga dalam (inner power), and I was
told I could achieve it should I dedicate myself to their training for 6 months; pro-
viding the example of two surgeons from abroad that had done so through his train-
ing a few years back, he aimed to emphasize how practitioners of Western medicine
have seen worth in this practice. Although when I asked if they were able to apply
their inner power in their practice, which in theory could avoid a number of
unnecessary surgeries, he said they did not. He however insisted that he could heal
internal wounds that would otherwise be “fixed” through surgical procedures. To
produce energy is to correspond breath and motion through kicks and similar fierce
full arm motions, the latter action that can be achieved while doing jamu, namely by
corresponding breath and upper body motions. I believe this combination also
enables one to “enter into” correspondence with the plants.
Dr. Gembong who prepares jamu in a clinical practice is a grand master of
Pencak Silat—Merpati Putih which is one of the main schools of tenaga dalam of
Indonesia. According to Jean-Marc De Grave, a French anthropologist who has
been working in Jogja for over 20 years, namely training as well as studying Pencak
Silat, the Merpati Putih school has known an unprecedented flourishing from the
1980s onwards (2012: 79). The school of Merpati Putih originated in Jogja.11 It is
one of the most popular martial arts in Indonesia and was once practiced in the kra-
ton; the art consists of inner-energy exercises through meditation, vibration, and
respiratory exercises, all crucial to the practice as they stimulate the energies inside
humans, namely providing the abilities to discern and heal through touch, sound,
and feel. “The school, while internationally famous for its self-defense techniques
of pencak silat […] is known above all for its breathing techniques. Believed to be
inherited from ancient Indian tantra, these practices make it possible to sharpen the
capacities related to body perception, especially skin perception and propriocep-
tion” (ibid. 2011: 126). Tenaga dalam can be controlled, manipulated, and accumu-
lated through breathing techniques, postures, and a series of movements. Some
exercises are done with eyes closed by concentrating one’s attention on internal
sensations.
De Grave explains “inner force” can be used for autodefence or for healing; in
the first case, tenaga dalam enables one to master physical contact with materiali-
ties, including human bodies, which is indissociable from rasa or the emotional
sensitivity that one needs to avoid harming oneself. In the second case, the tech-
niques are used to heal.
In the case of simple contusions, the practitioner can heal himself through special
exercises in which postures, movements, and adapted breathing forms are used. If
there are bruises or tendonitis, a qualified member of the school—the master (guru)
or a coach—can do massage to detect the damaged zones and help regenerate them
11
“Subsequently, when the founders started training the presidential guards in the school’s breath-
ing and ‘inner power’ techniques, the administrative center moved in 1976 to the Indonesian capi-
tal city, Jakarta (Western Java). Since the formal creation of the organization in 1963, the persons
in charge of Merpati Putih worked hard to rationalize their techniques by collaborating with mili-
tary, medical, and sport specialists” (De Grave 2011: 125–6).
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 27
or position them back into place. This qualified member may also apply tenaga
dalam to the therapy—which is parented to what we call magnetism in Europe—car-
ried out while placing hands a few centimeters above the zone to be treated. It is then
a question of interpreting the feelings registered on the palm. Those feelings give
indices (heat, cold, pins and needles, and so forth) on the nature and the precise loca-
tion of the pain, and attest to the energy exchange that occurs between the specialist
and the patient. This type of technique is called getaran (De Grave 2011: 129).
“According to Javanese experts, getaran (waves, vibrations) exist in themselves
and everywhere, including in human beings. The techniques used seek to sensitize
the body to subtle vibratory frequencies” (ibid.: 132). Techniques of getaran and
techniques of tenaga dalam can be mixed, done blindfold to enhance the senses
(ibid. 2007: 81). De Grave’s understanding of rasa within the martial arts corre-
sponds to the explanations given within the contexts of dancing and music. He sug-
gests that “rasa includes all that can be perceived and felt within the body […]
Inside rasa, ‘the true inner feeling’ (rasa sejati) can be activated by a special state of
concentration that is obtained by balancing the external senses and the internal
sense” (De Grave 2011: 124). Geertz (1960: 238) had further imbued rasa with reso-
nance of aesthetic and spiritual plenitude that can also resonate with these arts, as
well as with the practice of jamu.
In July 2015, I returned to Indonesia to show the film we had produced from the
fieldwork conducted in 2013.12 We had organized a 2-day workshop to discuss our
research with the jamu makers. I invited French scholar Jean-Marc De Grave to give
a talk within this context. At first, he was skeptical at being a speaker, not seeing the
connection between Pencak Silat and making jamu. Through the process of thinking
about this potential link, however, he began to notice how the movements in Pencak
Silat are in fact similar to those done in preparing jamu beverages: in particular, the
hand movements pushing forwards and backwards, synchronizing between breath
and motion, and producing energy. The added value in the case of jamu, in contrast
with Pencak Silat, is that it is energy entangling with plant-lives, the latter also in
motion and producing energy. Some of the jamu makers present at the workshop
revealed that they both gain as well as put energies in their beverages through cor-
responding motions, making the beverages much more powerful and connected to
the customer they have in mind as they prepare the drink. This example helps one
understand how daily entanglements with plant-lives can be an art, a performance,
a deepened ability to feel and connect inner and outer worlds. The idea of life-forces
that one can mobilize an increased ability to sense, including with other life forms,
is invested in doing jamu.
Aliran [flows, winds, literally translated as stream or current] in the socio-political realm
organize and channel fluid political forces that are always on the verge of sluggish motility
or even disorder. Aliran as Indonesian socio-political streams or currents described by
Geertz (1959) and Anderson (1990) share similar characteristics with the embodied aliran
of fluids and winds, nerves and veins—channels of and for essential life-forces. These
perspectives on the potential nature of aliran coincide with Javanese perspectives on and
12
See Note 1.
28 J. Laplante
A healer Ferzacca met during his fieldwork combined massage with herbal and
plant medicines she grows and processes herself. He explains her work as one of dis-
entangling “channels and networks that allow for the smooth flow (lancar) of fluids,
airs, and winds—the currents (aliran) of life—and in the process revitalize the fluent
and virtual pathos of self and omnipresent ethos of identity” (2001: 119). “While some
masseuses say their work is to loosen up entangled nerve networks, most masseuses
see a functionalism of nerves (saraf), veins (pembuluh darah), bones (tulang), joints
(persendian), muscle (otot, urat), breath (napas), winds (angins), and flows (aliran) as
networked within a dynamic configuration of inner life-force (tenaga dalam), natural
life-force (tenaga alam), and social life-force (tenaga lingkungan)—a badan mengalir,
or a body that flows—all of which are signified by rasa” (ibid.: 116). Healing work
done on the body is thus done on a body of aliran open to these life-forces.
Jamu is often used to clear passages, channels, or blockages. “For many of the
healing traditions breath (nafas) is an important sign and symptom of health and
disease, for it is the essence of a fluid life” (ibid.: 119). It is within such a theory of
fluids and flows that “the spit and its curative power to reduce a cancerous blockage
and the nipple as a bodily channel from which fluids (breast milk) flow” (ibid.: 120).
In its healing aspect, pencak silat can enable one to transfer and mobilize life-forces.
Achieving inner power and attuning rasa can augment the possibility of making and
preparing the right jamus for the right problem at the right moment. It is in this way
that jamu beverages can be understood as a flow that can enable, restore, or clarify
movement through bodies. In fact, jamu is generally done through acute sensing, as
I now aim to show through my fieldwork.
Cluster
It is early in July in 2013, and it is the beginning of Ramadan. Each day, early in the
morning, our group meets at the entrance of our homestay situated near the kraton in
the center of Jogja. The film crew includes three Indonesian Master’s students in
anthropology from Gadjah Mada University, a PhD student in anthropology from the
University of Ottawa, a visual artist, my two teenagers, and me. The students arrive
on their motorbikes, and we hop on behind them to spread out in smaller groups to
different places where we know jamu is being done. Doing jamu is vibrant throughout
the city: the liveliness of the plants and humans mixing in the everyday makes its heal-
ing potentials very real. We shoot scenes of people doing jamu, attuning our attention
and cameras to the human-plant entanglements in this healing art, performance and
practice. We follow sounds and movement simultaneously with GoPro, Flip, Samsung
phone, Canon and Nikon cameras, and a digital recorder. The smells abound in the air
of the kitchens, market stalls, spas, and back rooms of Jamu cafés where the healing
drinks are prepared. We are complicit with the women making jamu, participating in
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 29
The term jamu gendong is also used with reference to the elixirs themselves, especially those
13
passerbys. Sometimes she will call a taxi or a becak (cycle rickshaw) instead of
walking. She will return home when her bottles are empty, usually well after dark or
in the early evening, only to begin preparing beverages again for the next day.
“Herbal remedies can be divided into two categories: obat,14 or plant medicines, and
jamu, for which the term tonic seems a better fit” (Ferzacca 2001: 147). Jamu includes the
five to nine elixirs sold from door to door such as those carried by Ayu. One of the main
differences is that obat is dried and consumed afterwards while jamu is made and drunk
fresh in one quick gulp while it is still liquid. Limyati and Juniar (1998: 202) state there
14
‘Obat, or medicine, is considered broadly in Java to include all kinds of pharmaceuticals and
therapeutic practices, but also refers to pesticides, mosquito repellent [(for instance, referring to
antimosquito incense coils as mentioned in Poerwadarminta 1984: 682)], poisons, and other non-
medical substances (Afdhal and Welsch 1988: 150). Woodward suggests that Javanese define obat
as “any substance capable of altering the physical and/or spiritual composition of a human or other
body” (1985: 1011).
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 31
are 27 kinds of jamu elixirs in Java,15 but usually only seven kinds are peddled around.
During my stay in Jogja, the jamu elixirs I most encountered were defined according to
one or two main ingredients while others were defined by their use or particularity. They
are the following seven elixirs: kunir asam (turmeric and tamarind), beras kencur (rice
and sand ginger), cabe puyang (chili and aromatic ginger), galian jamu (for women to be
slim), pahitan jamu (bitter jamu), sirih (betel leaf), and uyup-uyup (for breastfeeding).
The jamu elixirs are mainly composed of spices made from rhizomes (forms of ginger,
curcuma, turmeric), barks (kinds of cinnamon), seeds (cardamom, pepper, rice, corian-
der), fruits (tamarind, lime, white pomegranate), leaves (betel, papaya), and flower buds
(cloves) (See Table 1 and 2). Making healing beverages with these plant materials, within
hundred other plant materials, as it is done in their homes on a daily basis by jamu sellers
and sold door to door, is most commonly what is referred to as jamu. Nuances, however,
emerge in the ways jamu sellers prepare and sell the elixirs (Fig. 2).
On July 23rd 2013, I met three jamu sellers living near each other in one neigh-
borhood of Jogja: the eldest was Ayu introduced above; the second, who I will call
JS, sets the elixirs in her bicycle rack and distributes them by bicycle to known cli-
ents; the third, who I will name Sumi, holds a permanent kiosk in another part of
town where she mixes her elixirs with lemon or eggs in situ depending on the cli-
ent’s expressed desires and problem. All prepare the beverages in their homes before
setting out to sell them in the streets, neighborhood and market, respectively. Sumi
prepares four kinds of elixirs, JS speaks of nine, and Ayu did not verbally specify
yet carries 7. The elixirs have similar names across sellers. Although they are simi-
lar tinctures, they are largely customized, refined through time and through
exchanges with customers and with other jamu sellers. What is common between
the three jamu sellers is a deepened engagement with the many bulbs, plants, leaves,
and barks with which they mash sensorially on a daily basis in their homes. They
can tell the different rhizomes by the sounds they make when they break, by their
smells, by their colors tinting their skins, and more generally by feeling their tex-
tures as well as “intensities.” Numerous nuances between the kinds of kunir (tur-
meric) and asem (tamarind) are known by the jamu sellers whose sophisticated
healing beverages are made with a high awareness of the subtleties between the
various rhizomes and fruits.
Most elixirs can be prepared in a more “intense” or “concentrated” manner as
well as other specificities. JS, for instance, explains she uses kunir asam is used for
menstruation and for freshening the body, intimating that concentrated turmeric
for gastric symptoms. The term kunir (Curcuma longa) is the Javanese word for
kunyit in Indonesian and refers to turmeric, which is different from temulawak
(Curcuma zedoaria) that is commonly called curcuma16 and refers to the Javanese
15
Warung Jamu Ginggang Café had more than 80 variations of fresh elixirs on the menu while
Merapi Herbal offered 13 different kinds (I discuss these two places in more details in the Lines
section). An instant jamu factory we visited (Jamu Tradisional Sapta Sari) had a list of 92 dried
jamu recipes.
16
Curcuma is a genus of more than 100 species in the family Zingiberaceae, including the species
turmeric. Its name comes from Arabic (kurkum) meaning “turmeric.”
32 J. Laplante
turmeric root; in both cases, there is a small variety and a larger variety known as
the “mother” or “stronger one,” and it usually has different uses. There are more
nuances, however, as JS showed us the curcuma she uses is a flatter rhizome, look-
ing more like the oval shape of a flat shell while the “mothers” are usually rounder.
When I asked to see the bulb that makes the hands yellow, JS pointed to kunyit:
This is the prime of kunyit [mother of turmeric—larger bulb]. The effectiveness is also dif-
ferent. The effectiveness of prime kunyit is bigger. It’s also kunyit but different [from the
small one]. This is the small [kunyit], this is to make jamu but consists of little effective-
ness, but this big one [the prime kunyit] is the empu (the main), the mother, it consist of
many concentrates. It can cure many diseases, such as maag (stomach disorder, ulcer),
ginjal (kidney), also for…, it can cure the stomach quickly. When your children…—you
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 33
have a child, right?—…get fever, if she/he is more than 1 years old, you need to mash one
of this, plus grated carrot, [then squeeze it], add honey and give it to the child, then it can
cure…
In a kitchen containing more then 20 different rhizomes all looking similar to the
untrained eye, JS could easily differentiate them for their uses before breaking them
in half to show their distinctive shades of color and aromas. She showed kencur as
well as jahe, explaining these were the ingredients to warm [the body]. Breaking
some in half to show us their different colors and fragrances, she spontaneously
explained: “here is kunyit for women who get menstruation, kunyit asem, for the
body odor, … this is ginger, it’s hot taste.” Making us listen to the sound of the
broken root, [attuning our attention to the breaking sound of this rhizome as distinct
from the previous one she had broken], she stated “it’s different, right? It’s temu
giring for women on lactation… this is kencur, for the voice.” Some are for healing,
some are for flavoring, some for both. Cinnamon for instance is curative, yet “it’s
also delicious for beverages, it’s good for syrup or beverages… to cure disease it
needs to be pulverized and added with honey, it’s good for stamina.… This is the
clove… I use [cinnamon and clove] so that kunyit asem and beras kencur taste more
delicious, that’s my secret.” Many jamus are mixed with curcuma (to increase the
appetite), puyang (to heal fatigue), and tamarind. She explained that a mixture is
often dominated by one plant yet that it is the combination of plants prepared in
specific ways for precise problems that matter.
JS makes a lot of uyup-uyup, which consists of leaves from various fruit trees and
is used for lactation, to increase the breastmilk and to be taken as follows during the
period of Ramadan: “So the breastfeeder drinks uyup-uyup before sahur [morning
meals around 4 a.m. preparing for the whole day fasting] and after break fasting
[around 6 p.m.]. Then even though they do fasting, they still drink jamu uyup-uyup.
And this is the intense kunyit. It’s like kunyit asam but more intense…” This prac-
tice shows the overlapping nuances of the beverages in terms of potencies. As with
many other jamu elixirs that can be enhanced with lemon, eggs, pepper, or alcohol,
it is only at the time of drinking the beverage that the intense kunyit will be mixed
with the basic liquid kunyit asam. Continuing to explain her practice, she showed
me other rhizomes, spices, and plant materials in her kitchen.
This is puyang also for lactation; this is sirih; this is made from kunir that was crushed,
cleaned and then blended, added by water and then blended so that it becomes like this
[showing a liquid paste]. This is the ingredient for fatigue; the required ingredients are
tumeric, curcuma, puyang and temuireng are added with cabe jawa (javanese chili), all of
them are squeezed, and added with a little water. So, it depends on the demand of the buyer;
if they want the bitter taste or not. If they want, it will be added with a little of the bitter
jamu, approximately half of glass, then added with honey, then stirred. Does she/he want it
added with egg? If she/he wanted to be added with egg, then the egg is firstly stirred then
added with all ingredients, it is mixed together and ready to be drunk. It is jamu for fatigue,
the fatigue for both male or female.
And jamu for lactation consist of many different kinds of leaves’; the ingredients are
numerous. Perhaps the main ingredients are from leaves, adem-adem ati, mango leaf, tama-
rind leaf, papaya leaf, all of them are mixed together, then boiled, and then blended so that
they become like this [showing an even liquid form]. Uyup-uyup is used to make the
breastmilk smooth. I made it based on the need of customer. Does she/he want the bitter
taste or not? Usually, I ask him/her whether she/he has hypertension or not. People with
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 35
hypertension are not allowed consuming too sweet. It has to consist of the bitter taste, even
little. It’s for uyup-uyup.
And for women jamu, I use all of these: temuireng, temulawak, and lempuyang, and add
sirih, and add rempah-rempah ingredients (spices) there is jenitri etc, for women, then I
filter and add.
Temuireng is usually used to increase appetite in children or for “cacingan.”17 It is said to
be very bitter (and it can also be used to put on a wound). For children who have difficulty
eating, [they can drink] temulawak and temuireng, but only little, as small as one teaspoon,
then we can increase to two teaspoons and add honey. Usually, it has no side effect. Generally,
drinking jamu may cause diarhea if it doesn’t fit the consumer, but I don’t know about drugs/
medicine. Basically, there is no chemical thing inside jamu. Then it’s really traditional.
This need for the drinks to “fit” (tjotjog), or to correspond, with the person is recur-
ring and requires constant adjustment and improvisation to the situation and contexts
at hand. They express the complexities, subtleties, and multiplicities in doing jamu.
They further attest to the need for the customer to be active. The customer must be
able to know something of the beverages, his preferences yet also his current mood,
timing, and bodily necessities, which he must express to find the jamu that will best
“fit.” The customer is involved in knowing what taste he prefers, just as in food; how-
ever, in this case, taste is also important for healing purposes. A particular jamu is
selected with relation to age, gender, mood, bodily sensation, time of the month, and
time of day—all of which require some forms of attunement to one’s current situation
in the world. For instance, sirih is used in jamu by women to avoid getting keputihan,
vaginal discharge of white mucus. The use of a same plant form, however, varies
depending on the women’s menstrual cycle or other bodily situation: “…Then for
women in menstruation, sirih could be added with a little temulawak and the concen-
trated kunyit, so that they don’t feel any pain. But if they have maag (ulcer), they can
drink that but without tamarind. Only squeezed curcuma and turmeric.”
While JS mostly showed us the rhizomes and tools used in her preparations, with
Sumi, we partook in the last steps of making her daily jamu beverages. When we
arrived in Sumi’s kitchen early in the afternoon, she had already prepared the ingre-
dients the night before, such as pealing and boiling the rhizomes and letting them
cool off by morning. After the morning prayer (around 4 a.m.), she then crushed the
ingredients and blended them, taking approximately 3 h to make her diverse jamu
elixirs, a process accelerated by a sporadic use of the blender, alternating between
pestle and pillar and using her hands, depending on the matter she was mashing. She
will be going to her kiosk at 2 p.m. She had already mixed the vegetal materialities
and was finishing by squeezing juice out of the tamarind and turmeric, leaving her
hands tinted in yellow. She explained the way she had prepared the kunir asem:
The kunyit first needs to be cleaned; cleaned and peeled one by one, because of the small
size of the roots [this is also done in a back and forth motion, leaning into the plants as fresh
water is poured on them]. So, some people fry the root and some people boil it; I boil them,
throw the water out [after boiling], then mass it [with her hands] and mix it with spices. It’s
also mixed with a bit of rice; it might be rice or rice powder. We mix altogether, then mash
17
One of the Indonesian students who was assisting in the spontaneous translation explained
cancingan as an illness understood as a worm inside the stomach. The worm decreases the appetite
or makes somebody look thinner, because it eats the meals that she/he has eaten.
36 J. Laplante
them altogether [with the hands], then blend with the blender machine, then filter it. [In
another pot], we make sugar. We boil the palm sugar together with tamarind so that we can
keep it for a longer time. So the mixed jamu has to be added with sugar and a little salt; then
filtered again, and added with water. Those are the making processes.
When the beverage was fully prepared, she asked if I was fasting because of
Ramadan. When I replied I was not, she offered me a taste, explaining it was good
for my blood circulation and more generally, that it was good for women. The ingre-
dients in this beverage were kunyit, asem, gula (sugar), rempah-rempah (spices);
the spices were cinnamon, clove, and cardamom. The spices had been crushed with
the pestle and pillar and then blended and mixed when she mashed all the ingredi-
ents with her hands. Nothing is measured; it is all “known” or “memorized,” as she
explained. When I asked about the “intense” kunir asem, she replied that this one
depended more on the dosage, and I was best to only try the “fresh drink” (rather
than the “intense” one). She explained that she prepared many other kinds of jamu
that jamu gendong and the seller on the bicycle did not prepare. In the permanent
kiosks where she will be selling, it is possible to vary preparations according to
issues to resolve; for instance, adding lime or chicken or duck eggs to beverages
prepared in situ upon demand. Sumi then showed us some of the spices she has on
her kitchen shelf to prepare her beverages:
rempah-rempah consist of cabe (chili), the black one, kayu manis (cinnamon, literally sweet
wood), kapulaga (cardamom), cengkeh (clove), ketumbar (coriander). Other ingredients to
prepare are kunyit, temulawak, temuireng, lempuyang, daun sirih (betel leaf), asem jawa
(javanese tamarind), gula jawa (javanese brown palm sugar), garam (salt). Those are the
ingredients, also kencur (form of ginger). For jamu pahit (bitter jamu), it consists of sambi-
roto (Andrographis paniculata Nees), temulawak, brotowali, cengkeh, those are the ingredi-
ents to be boiled and turned into black color (with bitter taste). Jamu for lactation consist of
temulawak, adem-adem ati leaf, temu giring, daun asem (tamarind leaf), daun mangga
(mango leaf); those are sliced into pieces and then boiled and then blended, so that they
become like this [showing the orange-brown beverage]. The raw ingredients are bought
fresh everyday from the mbah pujo (seller of jamu ingredients in the neighborhood).
Moving towards another shelf, she continues:
… this is manis jangan (sweet cinnamon), [this is] kayu manis, this [pointing to a
slightly different kind of cinnamon] is kayu manis, this is also kayu manis, it’s the same but
the function is different. This is also kayu manis. This is cengkeh, this is ulet-ulet [Helicteres
isora], this is kunci pepet [Kaempferia rotunda], this is delima putih [white pomegranate],
actually there are many others but I don’t have them. This is jenitri, that’s all…. this is joho
keling… actually there are many, the ingredients for jamu are many, when my mother sold
jamu, the ingredient of jamu were put in food storage and stored in a room. There are kemu-
kus [cube oil or Piper cubeba], all of them reached 50 kinds [of ingredients], there are
ketumbar [coriander], merica (pepper), merica bolong (perforated pepper), have you ever
heard of it? …merica is different from merica bolong. But I don’t have it. There is, kem-
bang lawang [Cinnamonum cassia/C. aromaticum lndonesia],…uh, it’s so many. But, I
don’t have them. Now, the jamu [ingredients] in Beringharjo market [Jogja’s central market
commonly known as Malioboro market] are decreasing. It’s not like in the past. In the past,
[the ingredients are] very complete. Very complete. My mother was going shopping [for the
ingredients] by andong (four wheeled carriage drawn by horse), she went by the andong
with a big amount [of ingredients]. She went shopping once in some weeks with andong.
Then she brought [the materials] into our house and put them in the storage room, and when
the children asked (my mother) [for example] about the galian recipe, we just read it and
she took a little amount of each ingredients/spices… I still remember the recipes, but the
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 37
note has disappeared. It’s only used by my mother. That kenanga flower [the ylang-ylang or
cananga, a shrub, the flower of which produces oils for perfume, Cananga odorata] is also
used for sari rapet [jamu to make the vagina tight and fragrant].
Learning how to prepare jamu is passed on through mothers in homes, from one
seller to another, and also from customers. JS for instance explained one of her nine
elixirs was a recipe given to her by a client who asked her to prepare it for him since
he was unable to do so himself. She has made the recipe her own. Sumi learned from
her grandmother and from her mother, and she also improved her beverages through
experience. She also adjusts to the contexts and to available tools, including the
blender as well as the practice of boiling the water now that it has become contami-
nated (people are told the water is not good to drink, hence everyone needs to boil
their water). There is also an association that offers training, Air Mancur,18 namely
one of the jamu industries in Central Java. Her mother is also participating in the
jamu association (she was a jamu gendong) while Sumi sells in a permanent kiosk.
“It’s going fast,” she says. What seems to be “going fast” according to her is a move
towards more standardized forms of jamu.
Together with the “yellow hands,” it is the way of preparing jamu with the pip-
isan that remains linked with “authenticity.” The pipisan is a cylinder-shaped stone
and stone tablet, between which herbs are rolled in order to extract juices. This is
done through slow back and forth movements. Pipis (or pipisan) are used to mash.
The process of making the ingredients smooth is called pipis and the result is called
pipisan, same as the tool. A pipisan was found in the ruins of the Hindu Temple of
Prambanan near Jogja and is dated to the eighth century. A rock carving of a group
of people serving jamu is also found in the Buddhist Borobudur Temple and is dated
to the ninth century. Both temples are in the peripheries of Jogja and attest to the
ancestrality of doing jamu on the island. Women dressed in javanese style while
preparing jamu with the pipisan are shown in photographs in the kraton and muse-
ums, again as a testament of ancestral Javanese practices. It has, however, largely
fallen out of use. Pointing at the pipisan in her kitchen, JS explained that it was “the
inheritance from my mother. In the past [I would use it]. I don’t use it anymore. I
use it just when there is an order from people who live far away from here and ask
the special one [special jamu done the “authentic” way]. If I want the easier way, I
use that [pointing to the blender].”
The pipisan would still be used for special occasions in the sultan’s palace to
make jamu such as parem (fluid to warm the body) or lulur (scrub). It is only with
Ayu and in Warung Jamu café19 that I saw the beverages prepared with the pipisan.
The latter has maintained this practice as part of the sultanic traditions upon which
the café prides itself. As Sumi also mentioned, there is a different taste (and perhaps
effect/affect) to the beverage depending on how it is prepared. Sumi alternates.
When she uses the blender, she mashes beforehand to not break the blender or to
give it a longer life span yet also to make sure her hands are tinted yellow, showing
18
Household jamu industry founded in 1963 in Solo, Central Java. http://www.airmancur.co.id,
Accessed 1 February 2015.
19
See Fig. 6.
38 J. Laplante
she nevertheless prepared the beverage. Sumi explains that “in the past, they crushed
then they used pipisan made from stone to make the ingredients smoother” “…in
the past, we used to read some prayer such as sholawat (praises to the messenger)
[while crushing], then crushing while praying. But now, people who like campur
sari (modern javanese song), they sing campur sari while crushing.” She cautions
that using the pipisan must be done slowly and rhythmically to not get pain. Now,
for higher production, the use of the blender quickens processes.
While Sumi speaks of “the past” as one with more ingredients and spirituality, in
her own practice, she is bringing back some of the aesthetics that the jamu sellers
abandoned in the more recent decades. It is only recently that Sumi had begun to
place banana leaves under her beverages to make them look more “traditional” as
well as to sell them for more money. The bathok is also returning for authenticity
purposes. On the other hand, some sellers will use plastic bags and straws or recy-
cled plastic water bottles instead of heavier thick glass bottles, which are more
convenient commodities yet less efficacious in maintaining the freshness of the elix-
irs. The “easier” route is thus a compromise, which also transforms the kinds of
jamu becomings undertaken in daily life: changing the materials they engage with
and the ways of preparing the beverages. Ayu pursued the “old” Javanese ways until
her recent passing away. The “koyo” she was wearing on the back of her neck (a
white paste sticking to the skin) was a treatment for masuk angin (Javanese illness
linked with wind) and not from carrying beverages on her back as I first imagined.
She was capable of treating herself as well as others through what can be qualified
as “Javanese ways.”
The evocation of the past and its reappropriation in the present is ongoing. The
expression masih Jawa asli (still authentically Javanese) is often heard in contem-
porary Java. “Anything asli—medicine,20 food, style, customs, architecture, history,
identity, to name a few empires of authenticity—is brandished as original. This
originality is not traced to some originator or genesis per se; rather, asli represents a
passage through time within a particular social and cultural space, namely moder-
nity, and namely a Javanese modernity” (Ferzacca 2001: 144). “The term asli has an
even broader meaning ranging from ‘original’ to ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic’, to ‘indig-
enous.’ Depending upon one’s interpretation of asli, obat asli may refer to locally
manufactured medicines of any sort, though few Indonesians would systematically
classify most Western-style pharmaceuticals as jamu simply because they were
made in Indonesia” (Afdhal and Welsch 1988: 150). Asked about the histories of
jamu, Sumi explains:
It’s from the ancestors. I don’t know exactly. When I was born, my mother and grandmother
had been working as jamu sellers. So, I saw, then I know how to make it, that’s all I know.
It is the inheritance from the grandmother of my grandmother, since then jamu had been
existing. In Java, it is usually… [thinking], for example when we were inside the jungle and
20
”The term asli has an even broader meaning ranging from ‘original’ to ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic’,
to ‘indigenous.’ Depending upon one’s interpretation of asli, obat asli may refer to locally manu-
factured medicines of any sort, though few Indonesians would systematically classify most
Western-style pharmaceuticals as jamu simply because they were made in Indonesia” (Afdhal and
Welsch 1988: 150).
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 39
suddenly injured by something, the people in the ancient period only use mandingan (petai
cina, Leucaena leucocephala), it’s then chewed and put on the injury and then could be
healed. When applied nowadays, apparently that leaf is very effective. In recent times,
something that I’ve learned and that I prepare for the consumer is for after caesarean; [the
woman] could drink water from boiled mandingan leaf, and she would be healed quickly.
The remaining water from the boiled mandingan leaf, could heal quickly [the injury] […],
the sap of it could also heal the injury effectively. It is the little example on the inheritance
of the ancestors. Another example is stomachache—so they have kunyit, then they chewed.
At that time, people in ancient period did the transfering of the chewed root from mouth to
mouth of the sufferer, then did like this, or perhaps filtered. For example this is the mother
and the baby or child, then [Sumi showed the practice of transfering the chewed root from
the mouth of mother to the mouth of a child] from the mother to the children, right? It is in
the past, the ancestors. It’s not good. Now, in the modern era, [the practice is not suggested
anymore], perhaps the mouth has unpleasant smell, perhaps mixed with bacteria, we don’t
know it yet right? But now we do parut (grate), or do some other method, then squeeze,
then given to children, it’s not the case in the past, yes, directly to the children. Apparently
it was working. I don’t know why it could be effective.
While the chewing seems to have fallen out of practice, the mashing with the
hands prevails as a testament of authenticity and freshness in contemporary Jogja.
Sumi explained:
if we prepare jamu, our hand turns like this [showing her own hands which were very
obviously tinted yellow from squishing turmeric and tamarind just a few minutes ago]. If
the hand is not like this, it means [she] is only a seller, perhaps she doesn’t use original
[ingredients], she uses the coloring (dye) [in jamu]. But the jamu seller [the original one],
the color [yellow] still always remains [on the hand] like this. There was a local [village]
competition, and the judge evaluated not only the jamu [taste, cleanliness, quality], but
also the hand. They tried to see our hand. They assured themselves that the sellers were
not adding chemicals, but only the original jamu from empon-empon.21 Then the hand is
always like this.
JS reiterated this importance when we asked what made the hand turn to yellow
color: “it’s because of the kunyit, when it’s squeezed, after it’s crushed with that
[showing a stone bowl and the rock a.k.a lumpang and alu (mortar and pestle in
javanese)], then blended, then squeezed and added with water.” When asked if she
would wash her hands, Sumi responded, “no, no, I don’t want to wash it, so that the
customers know that I made jamu myself. I don’t want to wash it. When you partici-
pate in the competition, you shouldn’t remove the color. If it’s removed, you won’t
be the winner, because they will think that you just take it from someone else. The
first thing they evaluate is the hand.” Thus, the key to authenticity is a thorough
embodiment of the core jamu plants’ colors, pointing to a more literal jamu becom-
ing, one that necessarily passes in-between the women and the rhizomes, making
itself both visible and meaningful (Figs. 3 and 4).
21
Empon-empon can signify one of two things: home garden or “pekarangang” of medicinal plants
cared for by families living in rural areas or Javanese villages who would tend to everyday ills or
health maintenance, or it also means a group of medicinal plants which belong to the ginger family
(e.g., kunir, kencur, jahe and laos or Alpinia galanga) used for first aid. Some species are also used
for spices, dyes, and ornamental plants (Riswan and Sangat-Roemantyo 2002: 5–6). Laos or
Alpinia galanga is blue ginger, namely one of the multiple forms of ginger that JS had in her
kitchen.
40 J. Laplante
Fig. 3 Yellow hands from a Jamu seller in a night stall of one of Jogja’s neighborhoods. Photo by
Melissa Robertson
Fig. 4 Yellow hands from a Jamu seller in a night stall of one of Jogja’s neighborhoods. Photo by
Melissa Robertson
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 41
Lines
In this mapping or in drawing my own line, I have become more attuned to how
people do jamu in Jogja: learning from people as they are doing, carrying, drinking,
selling, transforming, showing, or imagining jamu. People and plants move and
grow together making up lifeworlds in more or less entwined ways. Doing jamu
shows some of these becomings in time and space. In the previous section, I have
shown how three jamu makers from the same neighborhood do so from their homes.
While they share some ways of doing jamu, they also have their own improvisations,
respectively carrying jamu by foot, by bicycle, or by preferring a more permanent
setup in a kiosk, among other distinctions. These three ways of moving jamu around
can be conceptualized as soft lines pulled away from the neighborhoods yet brought
right back to their homes in the evening. The plants are also pulled from the ground,
pulled into the market and neighborhood, washed, broken, pulverized or mashed and
pulled back again to the market, sometimes taking root in someone’s backyard or
back alley. These contemporary ways of doing jamu evoke different aspects of both
ancestral and current practices of the art, fully grounding them into the everyday. It
is thus befitting to assume there are multiple lines pulled and bent by the middle and
are made to (dis) appear through space and time. There are three kinds of lines for
Deleuze and Guattari (1980: 271): the solid line (of power relations), the soft line
(that drifts around the solid lines without putting them into question), and the line of
flight (that opens to the unknown). Without tripping over a hierarchy of lines, this
constellation of lines, or “mutually implicated lines of movement, the trajectories
traced by the person as it unfolds and is unfolded” (Retsikas 2012: xix), can help
draw the different multifashioned ways jamu partakes into becomings in Jogja.
42 J. Laplante
Places in which plants and people become-jamu can be understood as lines feed-
ing off and into each other, sometimes converging, other times bifurcating and tak-
ing their own directions to be pursued over generations or to simply fade away.
Therefore, I do not want to suggest jamu moves linearly from ancient traditions to
modern biotechnological traditions, as some research on the topic tends to indicate,22
since jamu becomings plays itself out simultaneously by moving in multiple direc-
tions. Namely, there seems to be more than one mutually implicated solid line or
movement, or at least three that currently prevail in a kind of fluctuation: an ances-
tral animist sultanic Hindu-Buddhist Javanese line, an orthodox Islamic line, and a
scientific Indonesian republican secularist line emerging more recently. Jamu would
seem to pertain to the first line, yet some will argue it is Islamic rather than Javanese.23
It seems that jamu is both, and perhaps trifold. The jamu seller by bicycle intro-
duced above, for instance, does an Islamic prayer for each of her elixirs before head-
ing out to visit her clients. She also wears the hijab, a blouse, and pants rather than
the typical batik Javanese sarong. Her bicycle and blender are donations from local
NGOs to make the practice of doing jamu “easier” or at least “quicker” and more
productive. While this technology bends the practice in new fashions, it does not
seem to displace it from its Javanese embeddedness. Many of the jamu practices
seem to pull and bend one, both, or all three of these solid lines, softening them and
making them converge in certain instances, only once in a while passing more
clearly from one solid line to another or taking a line of flight. The Indonesian
instant jamu industry tends towards international protocols (in terms of hygiene,
laboratory safety, and efficacy procedures) yet does not comply fully to randomized
controlled trial regulations required by global health criteria, and for the moment
remains a national industry, secular in its own way. Sultanic practices in the
Indonesian Republic for their part prevail through new forms of government,
recently framed as “Javanese culture.” Yet from these softened lines, there are often
challenges or reinventions of “tradition” that take on their own lines of flight, as
some of the examples below will show.
I will here draw seven lines of jamu becoming. (1) a middle-aged woman sell-
ing jamu in the streets, becoming a Javanese culture servant; (2) a young woman’s
recipes persisting over five generations, becoming an herbal industry (laboratory
and Museum); (3) a middle-aged man pursuing a fifth-generation sultanic practice
in a “Traditional Jamu Café”; (4) a young woman’s garage beauty salon becoming
a spa industry; (5) a young man starting an herbal farm that turned into an agro-
touristic industry; (6) Dr. Gembong, who works in a clinic tailoring his ability by
mixing Javanese martial arts with a scientific background; and (7) a middle-aged
22
As is implicit in Afdhal and Welsch following the medicalization critique; however, they state in
conclusion how “jamu never seems to have totally divorced from the spiritual, mystical, meta-
physical, social and psychological aspects of mankind” (1988: 167), also referring to the works of
Jordaan (1985) and Suparlan (1978).
23
Woodward (1985) for instance argues that Javanese traditional medicine is based on Sufi Muslim
notions of personhood, knowledge, and magical powers (he is arguing against Geertz’s analysis,
claiming his analysis of Javanese theories of health is flawed). He therefore engages in debate of
origins, which is besides my purpose here.
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 43
The first time I slept in the palace, I was feeling strange. I was not scared, but felt safe. I
slept in a traditional weapon room. I was feeling safe, nothing happened that night. But
another night I slept in one room, I felt like I slept with an old woman and she stroked me.
Then I woke up, and I felt no doubt and satisfied to become a sultan’s servant. … After that,
my first salary was 1.250 rupiahs. It was 15 years ago. Then, after 4 years being a sultan’s
servant, the palace had a royal wedding. There I was interviewed on television. And my big
family finally discovered that I had been a sultan’s servant. They were very proud of it. They
thought that my pleasure to become a sultan’s servant is inherited from our grandmother.24
Because our grand mother was a sultan’s servant too! But I didn’t know about that. I felt
surprised that actually, I was one of the descendants of a sultan’s servant too. One person of
my family said that it is only me who continued what our grandmother did (becoming a
sultan’s servant). … Then, every 3.5 years I got promoted as a sultan’s servant jangkep
[wearing the complete Javanese costume] and so on. From here, I don’t get rich, but I feel
like a slow life comfort, like water flowing. My mind is peaceful and relaxed. Even back to
believing in God. So far becoming a sultan’s servant is a manifestation of my effort.
The feeling of comfort expressed as water flowing resonates with how healthy
bodies are experienced as well as how continuing the work of her grandmother par-
takes to this comfort. Vegetal life is also involved in this fluidity and comfort:
From all of this, I never imagined that this will be happen to me. So now I accept that this
is my way of life with kraton and selling jamu. I feel comfort, secure, and enjoy life because
the kraton is like a big tree that protects my family and me. I mention it is as a “big tree”
because there is a legend that the kraton has four pillars (saka guru) one of them made from
a real big unfelled tree.
The tree as protector offers a fascinating inversion of how in the West it is usually
humans who place themselves as protectors of trees. Javanese sultanic practices that
include feelings of permeability with plant life also prevail, even if transformed
within the new republic of Indonesia:
Originally one would be named a sultan’s servant yet, within the political climate accomo-
dating sultanic rule to the modern republic of Indonesia, this role became one of “preserv-
ing tradition” or at least maintaining some of its practices under new terms. I was trained in
a school named Pawiyatan, which means Javanese traditional education for citizens of the
palace. Pawiyatan is an education about Javanese traditional life inside the palace. We learn
about the history of the palace since its foundation in Yogyakarta until now. The school was
established by the kraton. The name of the school recently changed to Taman Siswa. First,
the school was for sultan’s servant only. When the palace still prevailed, the King’s children
and family studied in Pawiyatan. Pawiyatan was in Tamanan, a place near the palace.
Today, we can say this education model is hidden within the new Taman Siswa school. So,
now Jogja palace has started to teach Pawiyatan to the royal family and sultan’s servant
once again. The Pawiyatan school was held for a month, twice a week every Monday and
Thursday. And when we graduated, we received a certificate. This Pawiyatan has started
aknew for all sultan’s servants, women and men. And after they all finish, Pawiyatan will
be offered to citizens and all government officials in Yogyakarta. Then, I could not be called
a sultan’s servant any longer, yet rather a “Javanese culture servant.” This is since the inde-
pendence. For the past 3 years, Jogja has a debate with the Indonesian government; the
Indonesian government wants Jogja to be held by an election held governor and no longer
by a sultan. So the government officer of Jogja must get a certificate of the history of Java
In Javanese language it is called nunggak semi. It is a continuing of what the ancestors did, not
24
and of the history of the sultanate of Jogja. They cannot be called sultan’s servant, but the
“Guardian of Javanese heritage”.
Sula continues to sell jamu in the streets near the kraton. Typically, she buys the
ingredients once a week. Her day preparing jamu begins at 3 or 4 a.m., arriving to
her selling spot in alun-alun near the kraton by 5 a.m. and home at 11 a.m. She
makes this trip 5 days a week with no holiday schedule even on Eid day (Eid al-fitr
or the end of Ramadan). During Ramadan, things are slower. She explains that some
of the beverages are not prepared during Ramadan, yet uyup-uyup jamu is always
sold, one of the very common elixirs for women: “It is jamu for breastfeeding mom;
they are not fasting. Or maybe they will drink it at night.” Sula further mentioned
inggu jamu for cough (very strong material from China that smells like pine gum)
and pace jamu (passion fruit) for high blood pressure and cholesterol: “everyday ten
bottles of pace jamu have sold out. When there is an earthquake many people have
hypertension, and they want to drink it.” During the last big earthquake in 200626,
25
Masjid Gedhe Kauman or Kauman Great Mosque situated near the kraton.
26
On 27th May 2006 a magnitude 6.3 earthquake killed about 5,400 people produced in a three-
fold increase in activity at Merapi volcano. http://www.volcanolive.com/merapi.html, Accessed 8
January 2016.
46 J. Laplante
she was giving this jamu for free to people stranded in the streets. While this jamu
is somewhat an improvisation or an “innovation,” Sula also prepares an “ancestral”
jamu called sawan tahun prepared specifically for elderly people who follow
Javanese ways (“being kejawen”).
De Grave (2012: 35) defines “kejawen” as the basic structure of Javanese ritual.
He further mentions that this structure is under strong pressures coming from
Islamic orthodoxy on one side (pushing it to its disappearance or into clandestinity)
and from Indonesian republican secularism that accepts kejawen only if it adapts its
practices to modern life and folklorizes itself (for instance, as “Javanese culture”).
The way I am here proposing to understand kejawen is less as a “structure” and
more as an open-ended solid line that emerges in various directions, sometimes
shaped by and shaping other lines. In the case of Sula, she reconciles different lines
in her daily practices. Together with new kinds of jamu, she also prepares sawan
tahun on Mondays and Thursdays:
the elderly asking for this longstanding preparation often face to the west side to drink it,
saying something like “come health and gone sick—hopefully getting well,” this gesture
attesting to being kejawen…Those who “feel” kejawen usually face west upon drinking all
jamus, whether kunir asem, beras kencur or sawan tahun.
To follow Javanese ways one must face to the west side when drinking jamu. The
west side refers to Qiblah, the direction that should be faced when a Muslim prays
during salah27. It is fixed as the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca. This practice
attests to how “Javanese ways” are permeable to the diverse religions, here indi-
genizing Islamic faith within its practice, largely because it “fits,” or has been made
to “fit” as a way to continue becoming Javanese under Islamic rule. While Ferzacca
(2001) and Tambiah (1985) seem to emphasize the Hindic aspects of the kraton, for
Woodward, the kraton is a “Javanese house, but a very special one. It is the house of
the Sultan who is understood as being Allah’s representative on earth and as the
‘perfect man’ of classical Sufism. […] … the architecture of kraton is an earthy
representation of cosmic order” (2010: 137). On a touristic website praising the
kraton’s architecture and cultural diversity, our attention is brought to the “golden
throne pavilion,” noting that the roof of the pavilion combines Hindu patterns and
Buddhist lotus petals, with Arabic calligraphy quoting the Quran appearing on its
pillars28. This can attest to an interweaving of lines into what is understood as
Javanese. The kraton is also organized in cardinal orientations, thus making it easy
to face an Islamic orientation and making it Hindic Javanese at the same time. The
27
Salah is the Muslim prayer done five times everyday at prescribed times. In most public build-
ings in Jogja, such as at the University and in hospitals, there are special rooms available for the
worshiper to be able to pray peacefully. Praying begins standing and is followed by bowing, pros-
tration and lastly sitting on the ground. Megaphones the height of telephone posts rise above the
houses in most neighborhoods of Jogja and it is thus difficult not to hear the chants. Since it was
the period of Ramadan during our stay, many people awoke and had breakfast at 4 a.m. before the
morning prayer since they will be fasting throughout the day. We joined such a breakfast which
was offered in our hotel when our flight home was at 6 a.m. It was quite a joyous activity with
lively music playing.
28
http://www.indonesia.travel/en/destination/458/the-kraton, Accessed 28 May 2016.
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 47
Since she works in the spiritual part of the kraton, I asked her if she was involved
in healing or if she trained in pencak silat.
No I didn’t. I just trained about keraton’s history; the Javanese name of each part of keraton,
also about spirits who live in each part of keraton, such as sedhahan room which has a spirit
who lived in there.. but we don’t know how it is…. Actually kraton doesn’t organize the
silat anymore. But if people around kraton want to use one part of kraton to train, it is open
for them.
To the “healing” aspect of my question, she explains that not all sultan’s servants
get the calling from the spirit to cure other people, mentioning one of her friends did
get the “light of spirituality” and with this calling could heal other people. Her own
training involves some spirituality, and she often listens for things to come to her in
Fig. 5 East side of the kraton open to the public. Photo by Melissa Robertson
48 J. Laplante
the night. She, however, did not get the calling to become a healer. Sula’s story is
telling as it shows a movement towards ancestral practices within the contemporary
context; however, other jamu becomings take on complete different directions.
Showing a second movement or line, this time away rather than towards sultanic
practices, there are a dozen industrial jamu manufacturers throughout Indonesia:
among them Ratus, Jago, Air Mancur, Jamu Iboe, and Nyonya Meneer, all located
in the greater metropoles such as Jakarta, Semarang, and Surabaya. They are all
explained as originating from a single woman’s recipe that grew into a family busi-
ness and industry. Jamu Nyonya Meneer industry, for instance, follows a tradition
instigated by Nyonya Meneer a few generations ago. Its slogan is “I stand since
1919,” when the industry arose. It thus indicates a point of origin pertaining to a
scientific line. Its histories today appear in a Museum in Semarang with traditional
jamu prepared on a pipisan being enacted for visitors by two hired women. Behind
them, within numerous other tools and photographies of jamu making, is a tradi-
tional pipisan displayed behind glass. Making jamu with bare hands on the tradi-
tional pipisan is therefore displayed in the museum room as a relic of the past. This
live performance is separated by a door to the laboratories in back rooms which are
closed off to the public for hygienic reasons. While the laboratory is alive and
actively producing, the jamu preparations are “sterilized,” prepared with gloved
hands to avoid human “contamination.” This practice can be understood as a line of
flight as well, escaping the busy city streets or expanding family life upon joining a
national industry. Jamu becomings in this case move from a long, messy, yet mean-
ingful sensorial process of enmeshing with plants towards a dried clinical powdered
jamu in boxes and sachets that can travel throughout the country.
Expressing a third line, a family practice has followed another path, keeping
with the organic ways. The owner of Warung Jamu Ginggang29 café is the fifth
generation of a family linked to the Sultan of Yogyakarta. He inherited his busi-
ness from his mother who was the fourth generation. The first generation was a
tabib30 called Joyo Bilowo. She was working as a healer in Paku Alaman Palace31.
She was prescribing herbs in the palace, having also learned these skills from liv-
ing in the palace and serving as a healer. The owner’s Jamu Warung thus follows
29
https://gudeg.net/en/directory/23/4766/Warung-Jamu-Ginggang.html#.VNlkAinZVGg,
Accessed 8 February 2015.
30
Malay term meaning “doctor.” The etymology of the word comes from Arabic.
31
The owner explained that there are two Kings in Jogja from two different palaces; the Sultan and
Paku Alaman.
Paku Alaman is an autonomous palace built in the early nineteenth century east of the Kraton
following some disputes that involved different allegiances to Dutch governors and afterwards to
British governors. It nevertheless faces the Kraton to show respect and is considered as Javanese
cultural heritage of Yogyakarta. Paku Alam X is the current ruler of Paku Alaman and, as his father
who preceded him, he is the deputy governor of the special Region of Yogyakarta, serving under
the governor, Sultan HamengkuBuwono X. This follows an arrangement stipulated in Indonesian
national Law No 13 of 2012 on Indonesia’s special status. http://www.ilo.org/dyn/natlex/natlex4.
detail?p_lang=en&p_isn=64764&p_country=IDN&p_count=611&p_classification=01&p_class-
count=81, Accessed 28 May 2016.
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 49
the traditions from the palace. In the back rooms of his café, it is mostly women
who prepare jamu, preparing the beverages with the ancient tool of the pipisan
and coconut wood pillar. The pipisan used in Warung Café is made from the stone
of Merapi mountain, the volcano overlooking the city and constantly threatening
it with continuous activity. It is only one of the women who knows how to mix the
diverse beverages; the other women’s jobs being to make the ingredients smooth
in a very specific way. The women’s skills and movements to make the materials
smooth are crucial, yet so are the vibrant materials of volcanic stone and coconut
wood used for the pestle and pillar, interacting with the various forms of vegetal
life. The materials used to prepare the jamus are necessary to pulverize the vari-
ous forms of vegetal life to make “good” jamu in a slow tempo of rest and move-
ment. The room where three women were rolling the herbs on the pipisan to
extract the juice felt to me like a meditation room, as they knelt to “enter into” the
plants (Fig. 6).
When we met the owner of the café, he explained he had been working in the
jamu industry for quite a long time; “I worked in another jamu factory that is located
near Purawisata [a location near the kraton]. The former jamu factory that I worked
in was Jamu Cekok that is different with this jamu factory which is Jamu Ginggang.
Jamu Cekok products are usually for kids and lots of people buy it in the morning.32”
Warung Jamu Ginggang café makes drinks for all ages and bodily vitalities. The
woman who knows the mixes, for example, explained: “Jamu Sehat Lelaki (jamu
for healthy male) is for men and it has so many benefits. Usually, it is consumed to
reduce tiredness, cure headache. Compared to chemical medicines from the doctor,
this jamu can provide more lasting efficacy so that men can always have a fit body.
If chemical medicine, it can only give short lasting efficacy… this jamu can provide
longer lasting efficacy.” The owner added that “Jamu Sehat Lelaki is for maintaining
health and fitness so that the consumers can always feel fresh and healthy.” He then
turned his attention towards my 14-year-old son who was with us, telling him: “You
can be more handsome and stay young if you drink this jamu.” He continues to say
that “This jamu also makes you stay active so that you will no longer feel lazy to do
the daily activities because it also helps to smoothen33 blood pressure.” With more
than 80 jamu variations on the menu prepared for specific discomforts, ages, gender,
and even mood, it took quite a while for us to select the right jamu for us as this
particular time, both of the day, of our lives, and of our mood. The owner of Jamu
Warung Ginggang café prefers the liveliness of the fresh elixirs, keeping with the
homemade quality of the beverages prepared with the ancient tools and rhythms of
Javanese ways, thus solidifying this particular line.
In a reversed movement again, or one that bends slightly sideways, the Martha
Tilaar Women Spa offers yet a fourth line of jamu becomings. It began as a beauty
salon in a garage in 1970, and today it is a franchise that has eight branches on the
32
“It is called Jamu Cekok signifying that the ingredients will be fed directly into the mouth.”
(Haryono 2012).
33
The choice of the word “smoothen,” rather than “regulate,” can indicate that jamu is about cer-
tain consistencies meant to correspond with bodily flows by reducing potential blockages.
50 J. Laplante
Island of Java. While it emerges as a contemporary new age care practice, it delves
perhaps even deeper into some of the ancestral roots of jamu; in sultanic practices,
jamu was mostly used to make women beautiful and men powerful. The products
used are fresh turmeric, cardamom, cinnamon powders, some mixed in creams and
some to soak or for scrubbing in baths. This latter practice, the scrub, is in fact one
of the only ways jamu is still being done in Jogja’s current palace. The powders are
kept in glass containers. The massage is given with turmeric mixed in vegetal cream
spread onto the body. The spa branch I visited in Jogja offers massages with cur-
cuma as well as herbal fumigations of women’s private areas (vagina airing) with a
particular concern to excessive white mucus. In the spa, a small stove is installed
under a chair; herbs are burned with coils as the woman sits above the fumigations.
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 51
She is covered by a large batik that also covers the small stove. This fumigation is
done to “clean” the white mucus from the vagina and is something women do regu-
larly, one of the seven elixirs sold door to door (galian jamu), attending specifically
to this concern. The spa is calm and clean, and the services are offered in private
rooms with a bed, bath, and outdoor shower. There is also a common room for foot
baths as well as a jamu bar. The space is entirely built with organic materials and
attends to women’s beauty-care from head to toe. An ancient practice done in
Javanese sultanese ways thus extends its life into a new form that also joins into a
global beauty spa industry. The jamu or herbs and spices used are produced else-
where, usually in large gardens close to the franchises in the peripheries of bigger
cities such as Jakarta. This practice changes the nature of the immediacy of jamu
elixirs done with fresh plants in liquid form. The clinic is, however, in keeping with
other aspects of jamu evoked as “authentic,” thus softening both Javanese and sci-
entific solid lines by joining them from the middle.
Jamu Godhog (Merapi Farma Herbal)34 is yet another way jamu appears to join
solid Javanese and scientific lines in contemporary Jogja’s periphery, seemingly
playing many lines simultaneously. An agrotouristic endeavor, the business is com-
mitted to preserve traditional medicinal plants. The owner explained this place can
be a tourist destination for those who want general knowledge or scientific under-
standing of herbal plants. Conservation of medicinal plants has been done by Merapi
Farma Herbal through a cultivation system. Merapi Farma has ±5000 m2 garden
planted with a variety of medicinal herbs. There are more than 200 species of
medicinal plants grown in the garden. Cultivation of medicinal plants is done with
two planting systems: Multiple cropping System (more than one kind of crop) and
regular planting system with a medium pot or polybags. The owner, who was still in
high school when he began to build Merapi Farma Herbal in 1991, studied in Balai
Pengobatan Tradisional (The association of Traditional Herbal Medicine) in
Tawangsidikgu, Solo, a city near Jogja. He explains:
I was there to get more knowledge about traditional herbal medicine. And after that, I went
to kraton Jogja and met with an expert who knew Javanese traditional herbs. He trained me
about his knowledge in Javanese medicine. From then, I combined the science of Javanese
traditional medicine and scientific herbal medicine. From those sciences, I made my own
medicinal herbs that we know now. All of the recipes have been laboratory tested, and I
have also obtained official permits and legality from the Indonesian Health Department.
The Indonesian Health Department is like the Food and Drug Association in the USA. I
learned it from studying sources including recipes from the Jogja Palace and then I mixed
and combined them. I also inherited some skills and knowledge from my great grandfather.
Merapi Farma is only one of the production areas. I still have several other areas.
34
http://www.merapifarmaherbal.com, Accessed 29 May 2016.
52 J. Laplante
h ealing practicioner. His practice is more focused on healing people. So, I think we are dif-
ferent. …There are four categories of alternative practicioners; the categories are skills,
herbs, spiritual, and combination. And our products fall into the herbal category.
Dr Gembong35, a well-known dukhun in Jogja, where he has been living for the
past 40 years, offers a sixth line of becoming-jamu. He explains that he has known
the way of healing or healing “patterns” since he was 6 years old. His healing abili-
ties are in part inherited from his father who was a prince, namely a brother of the
Sultan Pakubuwono X of Solo kraton, also named Surakarta. Surakarta is a nearby
city ruled by the Pakubuwono family, known for their expertise in martial arts and
traditional medicine healing for generations. As mentioned earlier, he is himself a
grand master of pencak silat—Merpati Putih. To his expertise in Pencak Silat, Dr.
Gembong adds that he has training in the resonance of energy;
Learning about the healing frequency, when I came to Boston, I was with 60 blind persons
and I showed people there that the blind men could read, drive a car, and write fluently
although they were blind since they were children. We took them to Boston and London
Eyes Centre. The doctor checked them and they know that the persons were blind. We gave
them the healing frequency and until now they can drive a car.
While this anecdote sounded unbelievable to me at the time, it made more sense
upon exploring the techniques learned in pencak silat in developing rasa and tenaga
dalam, as well as upon observing him practice through sensing. Dr. Gembong also
explains his practice as similar to the way of the Tao in Chinese philosophy and
practice: “It is this energy that is useful for healing; it works like the energy in Yin
Yang. It is different between each person. So the energy can be trained and con-
trolled through the respiratory exercises.” Dr. Gembong can, for instance, read
“auras,”36 which he explains are an energy field that surrounds every human. Seeing
this aura is his way to sense the patient’s illness and discern the corresponding plant
medicine that should be prescribed. With a PhD in Agriculture and many years of
expertise as a lecturer in Universities, he combines this scientific background with
current training and inherited intuitive skills developed since his youth.
I examine patients using the electro encephalo magnetic waves; electro is a wave and
encephalo relates to the brain, so it means the brain wave. We use that energy to heal people.
Waves that come from the patient’s brain. And I also use inner energy to examine. I am able
to find out the patients’ illness without them telling me what they suffer from. Because
every person has a certain aura where it is determined by his/her condition and I am the one
who can see and read the aura.
My patients and I are close. I treat them with hospitality because healing isn’t only
physically through medicines but also psychologically. Psychological support by hearing
carefully what the patients’ feel [not so much what they say; although it could be in the way
they say things, their tonality] and sharing the empathy is really important and is a cure as
well. Therefore, through this interaction and relationship, my patients and I have inward
connection. When I observe a patient, there are four basic things I observe; the first observa-
tion is based on the patient’s psychological condition; then, I observe the anatomy and the
35
See also Ferzacca (2001) on his practices.
36
The idea of the “aura,” a kind of luminous radiation, is found in tantric tradition of Hinduism,
Jainism as well as in different forms of Buddhism.
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 53
physiology, the metabolic system; I also observe the pathology to find out whether there is
a virus involved; finally, I also observe the patients to find out if there is any abnormality in
their organs. When observing, I describe in details the illness that the patients have. Like
earlier when I drew a foot’s picture to tell to the patients so that they know exactly what they
suffer from. Every patient needs different medicines though they suffer from the same ill-
ness. Different medicine is required because some patients suffer from multiple illnesses or
problems.
Dealing with multiple illnesses or problems is something that is left in the shad-
ows of biomedicine, a system that largely relies upon a single cause and effect. Very
much is done in pharmaceutical practices by relying on a single molecule. Dr.
Gembong clearly strays from this limitation in his practices although he is well
aware of its rationality. He also strays from solely understanding plants as separate
entities, rather working with them as sentient life forms, also reading their aura. He
explains plants have similar functions as humans, their organs being like those of
humans. Showing the Daun Sirih growing in his front yard (Fig. 7), he explains that
Plants are also created by GOD, just like sirih or Daun Sirih (betel leaf); its leaves are like
a heart, it could be used as a heart’s medicine. This is the heart; this is the arteries. There are
plenty of plants like that, like ginko biloba, it looks like a brain and it also could be used as
a vitamin for the brain. Those are things that I explored. I started healing in the clinic when
I was 49 years old and now I am 58 years old. Actually GOD always shows every illness in
the human body. I even made an investigation into plants. When I broke the plant, there
would be a gas that came from it and the gas was a kind of a signal. Also, if we put some
chemicals in it, the plant will turn red. It showed that if we broke the plants, the components
inside it would communicate the bad influence to the other plants. So, the other plants
become worried and this was like the effect of the frequency of the gas wave. If you ask
why there are only few persons that could see it, it is because many people have bad minds
and they have many problems in it, so if they want to see the aura, they have to do medita-
tion to clear their minds, just like plants and animals. I also could see it because my father
trained me in meditation and silat; silat teaches us the ilmu getaran [literally the “science of
getaran” (wave, vibration) and alluding to pencak silat—Merpati Putih] and I only show it
to my students.
In ancient Java, healing did not only use herbal but also in singing. When I had a fever,
my father always sang a Javanese song and then I got well; because a song also contains a
54 J. Laplante
prayer. For now, I do this only for my own family, especially for my children. Javanese song
is sacral. There is also a song that could invite the devil. The song is influenced from Hindu
culture just like jamu also has an influence from Hindu religion.
And until now, I never commercialized my healing. It is free because I think that herbal
is the real method of healing and chemical medicine only imitates.’
Dr. Gembong mixes a scientific background with Javanese and Hindu healing
arts as well as with forms of social work; all of the employees who prepare jamu in
the back of the clinic are youth who had come into some sort of trouble. He explains,
“I fix their mental and now they are so religious.” Part of the way he “fixed their
mental” is by having them grate rhizomes to make jamu preparations in the back
rooms of his clinic, within other calm, meditative, and repetitive tasks. To the cli-
ents, Dr. Gembong offers healing consultations through touch and tailored jamu
preparations. He specifies that he does not use ancient recipes yet prepares bever-
ages according to his own research, apparently playing all lines at the same time in
a line of flight he has carved freely for himself. This practice shows there are no
straight lines yet lines which are bent, pulled by the middle, sometimes taking direc-
tions of their own for a while: “a line of becoming does not define itself by points
that it links nor by points that compose it; to the contrary, it passes between points,
it only pushes by the middle and dashes in a perpendicular direction to the points
that we first distinguished, transversal to the locatable relation between adjacent or
distant points … a line of becoming has no goal, nor end, no beginning, no arrival,
no origin, no destination…” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 359–60).
Attesting to the multiplicities of practices and ways of learning them, a jamu
herbalist expressed a seventh line or jamu becoming. This one first veers towards
biomedicine and afterwards away from it and into a entanglement of Islamic and
Javanese lines. Similarly to Dr. Gembong, he explained he had been a healer since
he was four, knowing how to heal with plants since 1974. He began healing in the
second grade of junior high school in 1981:
At the beginning I healed only family, then they let people know that I could heal. Then there
were neighbors, there were friends. It worked that way. Since the beginning, I never put adver-
tisement in the media. I did experiments; for example, if one ginger is compared with one
curcuma, then when it’s consumed, how does it affect? So, when two compared with one, how
does it affect? If one compared with two, how does it affect? It was from that habit of trying
out different amounts of rhizomes that led me to know exactly what effect that particular
combination will provide. The western pharmacological understanding or western pharma-
cology just do adding (mixing). For example, let’s say temulawak (also called turmeric) has
these specific functions, and added with temu giring (also called curcuma) has these specific
functions. They never see or never consider that these compounds, from different combina-
tions, will make new compounds that have different effects. And it’s almost similar in the case
of medicine. For example, let’s take the vitamin B1. To make it better, zinc should be added
for daya tahan tubuh (strong body), and added with manganese, for particular functions. Well,
this pattern is not right. It should rather be done by synergy or elimination. This is the way
herbal works. Moreover, the rhizomes are boiled together and another compound will appear.
That’s what I research, what I learn. In both pharmaceutical and medical understanding, this
kind of pharmacodynamics has never been well-comprehended.
Further, to identify the patient’s problem, I touch a particular part of the body and then I
check it. Then I know it is such and such a conditon, the illness is here, and the diagnosis is like
this. When I have to use the stethoscope to know the heart condition or the lungs, then I use the
stethoscope. Just like a usual physical check-up, like other doctors in general, no difference.
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 55
I learned by myself. I observed and learned the methods. I learned what is the result of
the mixture from this and that composition. I began to apply it in 1981. But, I didn’t do that
intensively, not more than ten patients per month. Also, that was the case when I was in
senior high school. Then I first took an education in the medical faculty, it was also working
that way. But after I finished my medical education, and became co-assisstant in 1993, there
were many new people who came to see me. Finally, I freed some time away from my co-
assistant activity. Since then I began healing. Formerly, I put a limit to the number of
patients. Then after I finished my co-assisstant work, I could heal full time. First, I was
working in an open clinic in Semarang, in 1994. In 1997, I opened a clinic in Jakarta. Many
patients in Jakarta asked me to open there. And in 1998, I opened a new clinic in Solo. I
opened a clinic in Jogja in 1999.
Rhizomes
When I traveled to Indonesia in July 2013, it was with an idea for a film. The film was
imagined according to a phenomenological approach in anthropology interested in
how people and plants entangle in the everyday. In Ingold’s (2011, 2013, 2015) phe-
nomenology of lines, flows, and materials in anthropology, “humans, things, and
56 J. Laplante
other forces in the meshwork37 do not interact as separate entities; they mesh, sustain-
ing relations of contiguity and resemblance, and constantly overlapping with each
other” (in Laterza et al. 2013: 167). This perspective corresponds with Deleuze and
Guattari’s (1980) “lines of becoming.” These scholars enable researchers to think a
world without objects and subjects as well as to pay attention to “affects,” which
Deleuze and Guattari (2005 [1991]: 169) define precisely as the nonhuman becom-
ings of man. They thus offer a way of opening anthropological thought towards fluid
ways of understanding bodies and more-than-human life in a broader sense. It is upon
my return from the field that I struggled to understand how their work “fit” so well in
understanding jamu practices in Java. It is then that I found Bateson’s 1972 work reso-
nating in Deleuze and Guattari’s known work Mille plateaux (1980). Bateson’s Steps
to an Ecology of Mind (1972) is revolutionary because it provides a means to move
from what he calls the “pathological epistemologies” of the subject in Western
thought. Bateson argued that nature cannot be separated from culture, nor can we
separate “mind from the structure in which it is immanent, such as human relation-
ship, the human society, or the ecosystem” (1972: 485). In other words, we must think
in-between or “transversally” (Guattari 2000: 29).
Both Ingold and Bateson offer methods for bringing Deleuze and Guattari’s
thoughts to my anthropological study of doing jamu in all of its fluidities38. Retsikas
(2012) also found Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective to “fit” as an understanding of
the person in Java39, namely as “subjects in motion” or becoming. He suggests “the
process of coming into being entails practices of aggregation and alignment”
(Retsikas 2012: 152). The image of the “weed” Deleuze and Guattari (1980) offer,
borrowing from Henry Miller (1939), points to being in the middle, in-betweenness,
to take things by the middle, and to make oneself open to the outside. In Chinese
tradition, to work on oneself, we write, paint, and play music, perfecting ones per-
sonality, attuning our individual humanity to the rhythms of universal creation
(Bordeleau 2009: 81). For Bordeleau, it is here that Mille Plateaux has a perfectly
compatible conception with the idea of creative resonance of the human body with
the universe defined by Taoist tradition. To complete oneself, to become-line is not
to “close” oneself; to the contrary, it is to make oneself available (ibid.: 83), as is
done in joining lair-batin through rasa in Java. It is in all of these aspects that I find
relevance in these approaches to understanding the ways of becoming-jamu in Java.
The women preparing jamu are attuned to, as well as developing, new sensing abili-
37
“Meshwork” can be understood as a “flow of material substance in a space that is topologically
fluid” (Ingold 2011: 64): the meshwork as an interweaving of lines is to be differentiated from the
notion of “network” defined by Latour (1987) as a set of interconnected points (ibid.).
38
An allusion to Shaw (2015) on Bringing Deleuze and Guattari down to Earth through Gregory
Bateson.
39
Bogue et al.’s (2014) recent anthology also attests to the general relevance of Deleuze’s work in
Asia. Works by authors in this anthology have found Deleuze useful in studies on Taoist onto-
aesthetics (Hsien-hao Liao 2014), Mahãyãna Buddhism (See 2014), ancient Chinese philosophy
(Jiang 2014), even finding a strange affinity with the Kyoto school (Higaki 2014). Deleuze and
Guattari (1980) themselves make several explicit references to China in delineating their thought
in Mille Plateaux (Bordeleau 2009).
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 57
ties through proximities with plants. Plant-lives can affect and be affected by them in
the passing in-between. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980) thought, described “as a radi-
cal or rhizomatic phenomenology of our lived experience” (Neimanis 2007: 280),
borrows the model of the “rhizome” from botany: a multicenter, anarchic, and under-
ground plant. While the rhizome is used metaphorically by these authors, jamu medi-
cine is literally made from multiple rhizomes transpiring into ways people organize
life in the islands. Rhizomes surface through the blooming of lovely flowers when
they are ready, otherwise becoming-imperceptible underground. Taking inspiration
in Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming” Houle explains,
In principle, becoming-plant would involve our extension and ideas entering into composi-
tion with something else in such a way that the particles emitted from the aggregate thus
composed will verb vegetally as a function of the relation of movement and rest, or of
molecular proximity, in which they can enter. Becoming-plant is the emission of particles
from a heterogeneous alliance we make which expresses in action the unique qualities of
plants or plant-lives. (Houle 2011: 97)
combinations of plants for them to tjotjog (to “fit”) in the way hoped for by the cli-
ent. The latter further needs to do rhizome with the woman preparing the beverage,
the plant mixture, and the problem to relieve or prevent; none of these elements are
being passive, but rather reveal trajectories of movements and growth. Following
plants used in jamu, exploring their relationships, was found more productive than
attempting to fragment jamu and document plants or ingredients as objects within
jamu. A plant leads to running water, its seed carried to a new place, each line per-
mitting new arrangements.
The semiotic link that Deleuze and Guattari compare to a tubercule agglomer-
ates. This agglomeration is seen in the case of freshly made jamu through specific
rhythmic acts, precise gestures learned in preparing them, sometimes as a way to
insure livelihood. There is an astounding amount of expertise attuned to dynamic
interactions that call in sometimes more than 100 different kinds of vegetal life
and all of the passings in-between them and in-between plant and human life.
Heterogeneity, connection, and multiplicity are the first three principles of the
rhizome mentioned by Deleuze and Guattari (2005: 9) as they elaborate a way of
thinking that traverses both “subject” and “object”: “There is no unity to serve as
a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort
in the object or ‘return’ in the subject … There are no points or positions in a
rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines.”
(ibid.) Jamu healing practices can be understood as particular arrangements that
can grow or decrease in different ways as they augment or diminish their connec-
tions. These lines of becoming unfold in the streets, in the palace, under yet other
styles in spas for women, in museums, laboratories and, more recently, in agro-
tourism, changing nature in connecting with other practices, with lines of flight
continuously emerging.
This leads to a fourth principle of the rhizome: the asignifying rupture. “A rhi-
zome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of
its old lines, or on new lines. […] Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity
according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed,
etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees.” (ibid.)
Fresh jamu stands alongside instant jamu, one evoking a tradition continued over
four or five generations40, another improvised spontaneously. The threat of a volca-
nic eruption can make new jamu beverages emerge. New beverages also emerge
from learning about diseases such as diabetes, this knowledge joining with the most
ancient practices of the beverages classically designed to make women beautiful
and men powerful. Woman spas delve into one-half of this particular line, while the
jamu aphrodisiac for men seems to appear in yet other forms, leaking into women’s
worlds as well. Jamu industries following strict hygienic laboratory principles
40
According to Retsakis, topogenic stories in Java would “merge the idea of the ‘path’ with the idea
of ‘origin’ and emphasize ‘the botanic image of the growing and spreading ‘tree’ that extends from
its base’ (Fox 1997: 9)” (2012: 4). In this way, the Javanese would appeal to a common foundation of
the “first people” that can extend over six to seven generations as well as touch all the present inhabit-
ants who are “constructed as consanguineaous in various, however distant, degrees” (ibid: 4).
Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 59
emerge while street jamu proliferates, all playing itself out at the same time, seem-
ingly continuously emerging in new forms in relation to contexts in motion.
A fifth and sixth principle of the rhizome are cartography and decalcomany,
particularly relevant when a rhizome is not subjected to a general or structural
model such as in jamu gendong. Those who prepare the beverages do so through
becoming-plant, not in imitating plants (or trying to represent their molecular con-
figuration or “real” composition) yet by enmeshing with them for their livelihood,
which depends upon the possibility to learn to heal through their virtues. Some,
more typically men, train in pencak silat to maximize this possibility of connection
with plants, in cultivating rasa and tenaga dalam. The healing aspect of pencak silat
is done from within, in the passing in-between things. Acute sensing in this way is
in utmost contrast to the current predesigned randomized controlled trial model
upon which all biopharmaceuticals rest; namely this kind of knowledge aims to
copy and represent an “objective reality”41 with most efforts trying to erase the pres-
ence of the scientist. “What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is
entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does
not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It
fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without
organs…” (ibid.: 12).
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980) “body without organs”42 breaks with the idea of a
closed organism. Thinking through the rhizome opens trails rather than closes them,
just as jamu elixirs aim to move through the fluidities of bodies as open mediums to
orient, attune, and unblock. Doing rhizome operates on the desire from external and
productive pushes, it implies a pragmatic which composes these multiplicities of
intensities: for instance, in the ways of rolling and squishing the rhizomes and plants
in an upper body back and forth motion to make vegetal life amenable to human
life. Doing jamu seems to work and proliferate pulling and bending practices from
the middle, or within the felt possibilities, finding potential lines of flight when
things no longer work. This practice makes a discourse of “loss” of ancient ways
overly simplistic. Jamu is open-ended and is a way of continuously composing,
mapping the world in the best ways possible, rather than offering a promise of clo-
sure based on a fixed trace or map designed in advance.
This continuous improvisation is how I found doing jamu emerges in contempo-
rary Jogja, showing how it is very lively. Human-plant entanglements connect yet
also carve, pioneer, create, and improvise new directions. Jamu medicine is
rhizomatic and done rhizomatically. As long as those who prepare or offer jamu
medicine become-plant to orient these processes, they also do rhizome with clients.
41
Rorty (1979: 334) highly critiqued this confusion in the way “objectivity” was understood to
mean both rational agreement and the mirror of nature.
42
In stating that the body is never an organism, Deleuze and Guattari are less opposed to the
“organ” than they are to this organization we call “organism”: “Dismantling the organism has
never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire
assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity,
and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor…. You have to keep
enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn.” (2005: 160).
60 J. Laplante
When these experts in part detach from becoming-plant through recipes, blenders, or
gloved hands and laboratory procedures, those who consume the products in turn
lose the impression they should become something else, relying solely on processes
outside themselves and supposedly contained in a medicine. In this case, jamu
becomes more like a biopharmaceutical. There, becoming something else is expected
regardless of one’s attunement or in the wake of a predetermined mechanism which
should simply do its work. Thus we fall into arborescent thought: “Arborescent sys-
tems are hierarchical systems with centers of significance and subjectification, cen-
tral automata like organized memories. In the corresponding models, an element
only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection
along preestablished paths” (ibid.: 16). Acentric system rather than hierarchical,
Deleuze and Guattari follow an ontology of the middle, in the water current taking
up speed in the middle. Rather than the tree, they propose the rhizome that people in
the area of the Indian Ocean would have preferred as my research attests to.
Rhizomatic thoughts echo in Geertz’ (1960) account of Javanese life as made up
of multiple layers overlapping each other. The constant flux of interpretation found
in Balinese life led Barth (1993) to present its social organization as one that gener-
ates variation. Bateson (1972) describes Balinese social organization as operating
through a general substitution of a plateau for climax; he uses the term “plateau” to
designate a region of continued intensities, vibrating on itself, without a particular
orientation towards a culminating point or other exterior finality (1972: 113). For
Deleuze and Guattari, plateaus are “all multiplicity connectable to other under-
ground superficial stems, such as to form a rhizome and to extend itself” (1980: 33).
Rhizomes are made of plateaus. Jamu is made of rhizomes.
The Tree
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Becoming-Plant: Jamu in Java, Indonesia 65
Karen McNamara
Introduction
The story of the small village of Kholabaria, in the western part of Bangladesh,
exemplifies the national attention recently focused on herbal medicines and medici-
nal plant production. The most well-known resident of this village is a medicinal
plant farmer named Afaz Uddin. In 2009, he received a Krishi Padak (Agriculture
Award) from Channel I, a private television network which introduced this award in
2006 to “recognize farmers of the rural areas who silently bring about change.”1
Channel I’s interest in rural farming and agriculture is connected to a popular televi-
sion show, Hridoye Mati O Manush (Men and Soil in Heart). The episode,
“Kholabaria—the Biggest Herbal Village of the Country,” aired on February 17,
1
http://www.bangladesh2day.com/newsfinance/2009/April/12/Promote-cultivation-of-medicinal-
plants.php. Accessed 7/3/13.
K. McNamara (*)
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore
e-mail: kotokaj@gmail.com
2
http://www.shykhseraj.com/programme/hridoye_mom_programme_list.php?press_sub_
id=&press_id=&pl=1&page=6. Accessed 7/3/13.
3
I refer to this village interchangeably as Oushadhigram and Kholabaria throughout the chapter.
The literal translation of Oushadhigram is “Medicine Village”; however, the village is often
referred to in English as “Herbal Village” due to the medicinal herbs that are grown there.
4
Community Herbal Healthcare is not the actual name of the organization. Because of increasing
government scrutiny of NGOs in Bangladesh, especially those that criticize the government, I have
chosen to use a pseudonym in order to protect their identity, as well as the people who work for
this organization.
5
Unani, Ayurveda, and Homeopathy are the formally recognized categories of traditional medicine
in Bangladesh.
6
Allopathy is the name used in the Bangladesh and the Indian subcontinent to refer to biomedicine
which was introduced to the area during British colonialism.
Medicinal Plants in Bangladesh: Planting Seeds of Care in the Weeds of Neoliberalism 69
7
I spoke with all the villagers and NGO workers in Bengali. I translated the Bengali into English
for the quotes used in this chapter.
70 K. McNamara
Fig. 1 Afaz in his garden (on left) and the sign (on right) which says “Afaz Pagla’s Herbal
Treatment Center.” Photo Credit: Star Insight, The Daily Star, January 5, 2008
Some traders even named their stores after Afaz (Shahidullah 2007). This cultiva-
tion of medicinal plants for livelihood in the Kholabaria area is the first of its kind
in Bangladesh (Shahidullah and Haque 2010). Typically collectors gather medicinal
plants from the wilderness and it is estimated that 90 % of the plants used for Unani,
Ayurvedic, and other herbal medicines are sourced from the wild (Ghani 1998;
SEDF & IC 2003).
Because of all the publicity, Afaz Uddin has become somewhat of a celebrity in
Bangladesh. The picture above is from a write-up on him in the Bangladeshi news-
paper, the Daily Star (Fig. 1). The sign says “Afaz Pagla’s Herbal Treatment Center.”
According to the Daily Star, the herbal plantations started in Kholabaria by Afaz
Uddin “just might be the beginning of a revolution of herbal medicine which has
already spread to numerous villages. He wants to spread his dream across the coun-
try, to other distant villages, and maybe even to other countries.”8 The article claims
that around six to seven thousand people have found employment because of Afaz’s
work and that many households now grow eight or nine kinds of plants.9
This article about Kholabaria also emphasizes the self-sufficiency of the villagers:
Many village dwellers that used to be helpless now make a living. They used to starve. Now
they are independent. They are self-sufficient. Many herbs are being sold just because of the
‘brand’ name of Afaz Pagla. Through collective effort, the Number 9 Laxmipur-Kholabaria
medicine market has been established, where people sell Shotomuli, Tejbol, Daudmuni,
Krishnotulshi, Ghritokanchon [wild asparagus, Euphorbia neriifolia L. or Indian spurget-
ree, basil, aloe vera] and many other types of plant leaves, vines and roots. People are not
only selling it raw, but have also learnt to make a powdered form by drying the raw
material.10
8
http://archive.thedailystar.net/starinsight/2008/01/01/cover.htm. Accessed 7/3/13.
9
http://archive.thedailystar.net/starinsight/2008/01/01/cover.htm. Accessed 7/3/13.
10
http://archive.thedailystar.net/starinsight/2008/01/01/cover.htm. Accessed 7/3/13.
Medicinal Plants in Bangladesh: Planting Seeds of Care in the Weeds of Neoliberalism 71
the expertise of the market, NGOs, and international institutions to manage public
health and provide primary healthcare.
The United States and the World Bank put pressure on Bangladesh to change
certain domestic and foreign policies in order to receive aid. In the health sector,
these changes included the creation of family planning programs to control popula-
tion growth, the privatization of health (mostly through NGOs and private hospitals/
clinics), and the increasing use of pharmaceuticals in healthcare. This privatization
of healthcare includes the transfer of societal responsibilities from the government
to the individual who is responsible for his or her own well-being and care (Barry
et al. 1996). A neoliberal ideology views individuals as autonomous, rational pro-
ducers and consumers who make decisions based predominantly on material and
economic concerns. Therefore, individuals and communities become responsible
for making the right choices to care for themselves without intervention from the
state. This ideology of responsibility hides the structural suffering and injustices
that are created by market forces in the name of a liberal notion of freedom and
freedom of choice (Farmer 2003) because not all people can afford to choose the
same medicines and treatment. In Bangladesh, the growth of private health services
has also increased costs and reduced access to healthcare (Muhammad 2015).
What does self-healing and self-care by members of CHH mean in the context of
neoliberal governance that operates in such a way that individuals are encouraged to
become responsible for their own healthcare? Self-healing and other “technologies
of the self” (Foucault 1988) have always been a means by which individuals, often
with the help of a group, seek to improve their lives. However, when bureaucracies,
NGOs, or states use these technologies, they can become a way to govern a popula-
tion. While the autonomous self is often thought of as the locus of resistance, free-
dom, and political opposition, in neoliberal regimes it is the individual self that
becomes the heart of disciplinary control through active self-regulation (McNay
2009). Some scholars argue that this kind of governance can lead to a public domain
which is colonized by private interests and not for the creation of social bonds. This
breakdown of social relations can lead to the erosion of collective values and bonds
of care, duty, and obligation at all levels of society (McNay 2009; Lynch et al. 2009;
McDermont 2009). Furthermore, if citizens are deemed responsible for their own
care, then the state’s obligations to its citizens are only weakened (McNay 2009;
Muehlebach 2012). CHH, the Bangladeshi health organization that I describe in this
chapter, has characteristics similar to the volunteer care communities that
Muehlebach (2007, 2012) describes in Italy. Both groups emphasize the inherent
moral values of tradition and region and the importance of affective relations
between members of the community. These “caring” characteristics in the new
Italian communities are what the Italian state uses to support its neoliberal with-
drawal of state services. Therefore, calls for and recognition of traditional national
values end up contributing to the breakdown of the welfare state in Italy. Although
there are similarities with the neoliberal withdrawal of services from the state that
are happening in Italy, the practices of the nonprofit organization CHH described in
this chapter complicate understandings of neoliberalism in postcolonial contexts.
Medicinal Plants in Bangladesh: Planting Seeds of Care in the Weeds of Neoliberalism 73
The neoliberal transitions in Bangladesh have not unfolded in the same way as
they have in more industrialized countries, like Italy. In his work on corruption and
the state in India, Akhil Gupta (2012) explains how states transition from sovereign
welfare states to neoliberal market economies, but makes an important distinction
between the transition of democratic states and the transition of states that never
were a welfare state. For industrialized democratic states like the United States and
countries in Europe, this neoliberal transition resulted in the withdrawal of many
government services that cared for the population. However, states like India and
Bangladesh did not successfully establish welfare states that provided guaranteed
security to all of its citizens, so there was never a widespread distribution of services
by the government. Moreover, the few services provided by government healthcare
facilities do not always fulfill their policy proscriptions, which nongovernmental
organizations like CHH seek to help fill. One could respond to these poverty prob-
lems by reinstating developmental states in the wake of neoliberal transitions.
Ferguson takes issue with this simplistic solution that focuses on the nation-state
and governmental power. He asks,
Can we find ways of thinking creatively about the progressive possibilities (and not only the
reactionary dangers) of this new terrain of transnational organizations of funds, energies,
and affect? Can we imagine new ‘arts of government’ that might take advantage of (rather
than simply denouncing or resisting) recent transformations in the spatial organization of
government and social assistance? (Ferguson 2010: 169)
11
Akash and other names used in this chapter are pseudonyms, to protect the identity of the people
who work at the NGO. However, the actual names of public figures, such as Afaz Uddin, are used.
74 K. McNamara
borhood in the northwestern section of the capital city of Dhaka. There is also
another small office in a small city in the Western part of Bangladesh where they
coordinate their activities in the surrounding villages. Akash had previously worked
in the same locality with a different NGO, so he was familiar with the area and knew
people in the locale. It was an ideal place to promote the cultivation of herbal medic-
inal plants because the land is relatively high and does not flood as much as other
parts of the country, which allows the production of herbal plants year-round.
Inspired by the story of Kholabaria, Akash led a study to assess the situation for
farmers in the herbal village. He found out that the farmers who grew medicinal
plants benefitted in three different ways:
First, their resistance to disease increases. Second, whenever they are sick, they can treat
themselves using the medicinal plants, which doesn’t require any help from a doctor. Third,
it works as an alternative source of income. So, we found that these [benefits] to be good
things. Also, no NGO in Bangladesh had ever done any work like this.12
Akash sought to model the work of his NGO, Community Herbal Healthcare, on
the self-reliance and success of Afaz and other farmers in Kholabaria.
In 2006, CHH started its work on “Sustainable Health through Indigenous
Knowledge and Alternative Resources.” This project aims to relieve the suffering
and ill health of poor people living in rural areas in Bangladesh. Akash narrates a
story of loss and neglect to describe the health situation in rural areas. The loss
refers to the loss of indigenous knowledge about herbal healing. In his narrative, this
loss has happened because many local kobiraj (herbal healers) are not well educated
and the younger generation is not interested in the profession of herbal healer. In
addition, older members of society have knowledge about medicinal plants, but this
knowledge is not passed down to the younger generation. The dominance of “main-
stream western medicine” is seen to threaten and devalue indigenous knowledge
about herbal medicine. The neglect refers to the lack of good healthcare in rural
areas, both from herbal and allopathic practitioners. There are few “qualified” allo-
pathic doctors in rural areas13 and even when there are doctors available, many rural
residents are not able to afford their high fees. Akash highlights the discrepancy
between the government’s health policy and the actual situation:
The government has a good health policy for ensuring the health services for the people.
And the government has established union health complexes in each and every union of
Bangladesh to achieve the objectives. But there are no doctors, no medicines and no nurses
12
Akash said that his NGO is the only one working on issues related to medicinal plants and sus-
tainable health. Later, I did find a few other organizations that work with medicinal plants. Most of
these projects are working in the Rajshahi, Khulna and Chittagong Divisions of Bangladesh. Two
of the projects are compiling data about the production, marketing, and management aspects of
medicinal plants, while the last project is examining the conservation initiative and documenting
traditional knowledge. LEAF’s work, started in 2004, is the most similar to CHH. Their key mes-
sage is “encouraging and equipping small farmers to take responsibility for their own develop-
ment” (Shahidullah 2007: 62).
13
Al Jazeera featured a short documentary on the lack of medical clinics in rural areas in
Bangladesh. This video highlights a rickshaw puller who saved money for years in order to build
a hospital in his village. See http://www.aljazeera.com/video/asia/2012/02/20122191140124698
22.html
Medicinal Plants in Bangladesh: Planting Seeds of Care in the Weeds of Neoliberalism 75
there. The union health complex is like a ghost’s house. People have been deprived of
government health facilities. That’s why underprivileged people have to go to local indig-
enous health practitioners.
In focus groups and conversations with women in some of the villages where
CHH works, women narrated a similar story about the failure of government health
facilities. They told stories of union health complexes without the medicines they
needed and of health workers who were only interested in administering and giving
out forms of birth control. Also, most of the village women did not feel comfortable
going to the government hospital because they said they were treated poorly and
looked down upon by the doctors and staff. They described doctors who were only
interested in bebshay (doing business) and some women said that doctors whom
they visited while pregnant insisted on doing cesar (cesarean sections) instead of a
“normal” birth because they (the doctors) “koshto korte chai nai (didn’t want to
trouble themselves).” According to the women, a c-section should cost 1800 taka
(~$24) but doctors were charging from 10,000 to 15,000 taka (~$130–$195). The
stories these women circulate about doctors at the government health facilities por-
tray doctors as greedy, dishonest, and uncaring, which sometimes discourages other
villagers from seeking care in these medical spaces where the health services
provided by the state are lacking and uneven. The predominant access to govern-
ment healthcare in the form of family planning reveals the national emphasis on
population control due to pressures from international donors (Feldman 1990).
The goal of “Sustainable Health through Indigenous Knowledge and Alternative
Resources” is to revive indigenous health knowledge (IHK) about herbal medicine
in order to provide health services that are lacking in the rural area where CHH
works. The project educates villagers and local kobiraj (herbal healers) about dis-
ease and herbal plants, trains villagers and farmers to plant herbal gardens, and
builds partnerships between farmers, other NGOs, and the government to promote
herbal medicine. The project has three main ways to “enhance sustainable liveli-
hoods” through the promotion of “traditional medicine”:14 the cultivation of medici-
nal plants through the Krishok Forum (Farmer’s Forum), the establishment of
homestead gardens and community nurseries, and the organization of “reflect cir-
cles” to educate villagers on disease prevention and treatment with herbal medicine.
In his description of the project’s philosophy, Akash connects ideas of health self-
care with self-sufficiency—both for villagers and for the nation:
Our “philosophy” is that for anyone who takes medicinal plants regularly, he increases his
capacity to prevent disease. If his disease prevention capacity increases, he suffers from less
disease than before. And if that happens, his days of labor bere jai [capacity of labor
increases]. If his hours of labor increase, his secondary income source also increases. So,
on the one hand, his income source increases, on the other hand his health costs decrease.
So, if his health costs decrease, that extra amount will add to his real income. In addition,
the extra money from low health costs is added to his already increased income. These two
things add up to an increased insurance of sustainability.
14
Akash would use the English term “traditional medicine” interchangeably with “herbal medi-
cine” or indigenous medicine.
76 K. McNamara
This philosophy was also translated into formulaic equations (in English) in a
CHH brochure. The formulas are: “Sustainable health = Disease prevention capacity
increase + Decreased health costs +
Secondary income source increased” and
“Sustainable livelihood = Day labor increase + Decreased health costs + Secondary
income source increased.” By growing and selling herbal plants, villagers could also
increase their economic self-sufficiency. However, this notion of self-sufficiency
ironically relies on the growth of an herbal medicine industry in Bangladesh.
Villagers who sell medicinal plants grown in their homestead gardens have to sell
the plants themselves (usually to hawkers), but CHH helps farmers who are part of
the Krishok Forum (Farmer’s Forum), which I explain later in the chapter. Although
the possibility of generating extra income is dependent on many factors, it is signifi-
cant that the project on sustainable health does not create any income loss for par-
ticipants or the need to borrow money. Most NGOs in Bangladesh have some form
of microcredit program that often leaves poor communities more vulnerable as they
become trapped in cycles of debt (Karim 2011; Muhammad 2015). Muhammad
describes the development paradigm in Bangladesh as “a neoliberal path of growth
sugarcoated with ‘poor friendly’ NGOs and microcredit” (2015: 44).
In CHH’s vision of ideal health in rural Bangladesh, villagers would become self-
sufficient by growing medicinal plants, both to use for healing themselves and to
sell for extra income. There would not be a dependency on government or private
healthcare providers because in their view, “the indigenous knowledge is our own
and it depends on our own resources.” Shantu and Faiz are two NGO workers from
the local CHH office in a small Bangladeshi city who accompanied me on trips to
CHH projects in local villages and to Kholabaria. They both had extensive experi-
ence working in rural Bangladesh and had grown up in neighboring areas. Shantu
explained the process of finding villagers to work with CHH:
We walk around looking at the types of houses to see whether they are tin shed or pukka
(built from concrete or brick). If they look more dorridro (poor), then we talk to the resi-
dents and see if they have any interest [in the CHH program]. People who aren’t the poorest
Medicinal Plants in Bangladesh: Planting Seeds of Care in the Weeds of Neoliberalism 77
aren’t as interested in gajer oshud (medicinal plants) because they say that they could die if
they don’t see a doctor. But for those who decide to do training, after 18 months, three out
of ten usually keep up with it. Not everyone has an interest though.
The training in the use of medicinal plants for self-healing mainly happens in
“reflect circles,” which involve meetings where CHH staff members sit down in
places in the village together with 25–30 women to discuss their problems with
them. The reflect circles work to raise villagers’ awareness about various diseases
and inform them about the effectiveness of different herbal medicines that they can
grow themselves. They are told what rog (disease) each plant can treat or prevent.
To this end, each member is supplied with 10–12 herbal saplings. A CHH worker
explained the concept of the reflect circles as they relate to the homestead herbal
plantations:
Well, we have a circle with 25 women. In the front of that circle, there is a place where we
made herbal plant gardens… Second, to us the “homestead herbal plantation” is like an
alternative of keeping Paracetamol in the home for the treatment of things like cough. We
tell them [the village women] to plant two medicinal plants in their houses and take that if
needed. That will increase disease prevention capacity in a natural way and will cure dis-
eases without side effects. But if I keep taking Napa [pharmaceutical pain killer], that may
have side effects. That’s why we advise them to make a medicinal garden in the yard of each
house. People don’t need to keep Napa in the drawer.
Over a period of 2 years CHH supplied over 300 households with saplings and
maintained four reflect circles with village women. In addition to the 300 household
gardens, there are also “community nurseries” which augment the types of plants
available and act as a “medicine bank” for the community. Each garden has from 15
to 16 varieties of plants. These community nurseries are owned by the whole com-
munity and are located in public spaces, such as on school grounds or outside the
Union Parishad (local government office). Shantu further clarified the role of com-
munity nurseries:
We have the concept of community medicine shop. Say, in a village, there is a medicine
shop as there is in my village. Now, there are some problems if anybody needs medicine at
night because the shop is closed at that time. If there is a garden of medicinal plants in a
village, anybody can take plants at any time even at 2 a.m.! That’s why we named it a
“Community Nursery” whose owners are the people of that community. There is no indi-
vidual ownership.
Usually, there are two gardens, one for medicine and one with plants to sell (with
profits split by the community). Community nurseries are not owned by individuals,
but are meant to foster good relations between community members as they work
together in the gardens. A committee of 10–12 people operates the community nurs-
eries. This nursery also collects seeds that are sold to villagers in the surrounding
area. There is also another program that targets school children and has been started
in five schools, called “Quality Health.” This program encourages schools to plant
gardens nearby that are accessible to students. Shantu explained that if a student
gets sick while at school, “our prescription is that it is better to garden in front of the
school than to go to a doctor…anybody can pluck a leaf and feed that to the child
after washing it which will save them the money that would have been used to buy
78 K. McNamara
15
It was not possible for me to understand all the complex dynamics of the village women’s lives
since I could not stay in the village for an extended period of time. Since my entry into the village
was through CHH, they also assumed that I worked for the NGO, until I explained otherwise.
Medicinal Plants in Bangladesh: Planting Seeds of Care in the Weeds of Neoliberalism 79
the area who were mired in debt from an overaccumulation of micro-loans from
NGOs such as Grameen Bank, Proshika, and Asha (women are especially the
target of microcredit).
Shantu had a lot of sympathy for the struggles of many villagers he worked with
because his family came from a nearby village, even though he grew up in town. He
told stories about various NGOs’ micro-lending practices. “The agents from the
NGOs have different collection days and sometimes they collect as much as 200
taka [~$3 which is a significant amount of money for a villager] a day from villag-
ers. If a villager doesn’t pay, then the agent will sit at their house, take tin away
[material to build a house], or take their cattle away.” He said in his own village
many people borrowed money to build tin houses to replace their dab (mud) houses.
He described villagers who had taken additional micro-loans to make payments on
their existing loans or even used the money to buy food. In the worst case scenario,
women who can’t pay back their loans have taken beesh (poison). In the context of
a country saturated in debt from microcredit lending, CHH was different because it
was advocating for an increase in economic and healthy well-being without the use
of micro-loans. To their benefit, CHH is such a small NGO that it does not have the
economic power or manpower of the many national and international NGOs that
work in microcredit.16
CHH workers were sometimes frustrated by their goal to improve the self-
sufficiency of women. Shantu once complained that some mothers are allosh (lazy)
because “they don’t want to do a lot of work” and it is easier for them to go see a
doctor (rather than grow and prepare their own herbal medicines), even though they
have to spend money to see a doctor. Another CHH worker said that villagers were
so used to receiving things that they didn’t want to work: “they [villagers] just say
if they want something and they tell people to give it to them and if they go some-
where they think that they will get something.” These frustrations reveal the gap
between the desire of CHH to make people self-sufficient and the villagers’ own
desires, time constraints, and other responsibilities. It is somewhat ironic that if
CHH, an NGO with a goal to create self-sufficiency, is successful in their endeavor
then the NGO would become obsolete because the villagers would no longer need
their services. The tensions between the goals of NGOs and the targets of their
development underscore the powerful social and economic role of NGOs in
Bangladesh. An added tension comes from the class differences between NGO
workers and the impoverished people the NGOs serve. Most of the administrative
positions of NGOs are middle-class workers who are not from the villages they
work in, although they might be from a nearby area.
16
See Lamia Karim’s 2009 book, Microfinance and its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh,
for an in-depth ethnographic study of this complex and controversial phenomenon.
80 K. McNamara
Through the Krishok Forum (Farmer’s Forum), CHH makes arrangements for the
farmers to sell medicinal plants to kobiraj (herbal healers), local traders, and espe-
cially pharmaceutical companies. CHH is encouraging villagers to grow plants
that they predict herbal pharmaceutical companies will need. Although farmers in
Kholabaria have their own network of sellers and traders, they do not usually sell
directly to pharmaceutical companies. This is where CHH is trying to fill in a gap.
Organizations like CHH and other development promotors work “to enhance the
livelihoods of the poor [and] can play a catalytic role in enabling farmers to
increase their level of competitiveness and diversify both products and markets
for incremental benefit” (Shahidullah and Haque 2010: 3). However, the self-
sufficiency of the farmers and villagers increasingly becomes dependent on the
pharmaceutical companies, not for medicines, but for the companies to buy their
plants. These companies include Unani and Ayurvedic drug manufacturing com-
panies, but also allopathic pharmaceutical companies that are entering into the
herbal medicine market.
The experiences of one herbal healer we met in Kholabaria demonstrate the
struggles that farmers have in growing and selling their medicinal plants. Farhan
Kobiraj, has lived in Kholabaria for the last 18–20 years. He did not come from a
familial line of kobiraj (herbal healer), but was interested in learning this trade in
order to treat dorridro (poor people). He didn’t study herbal medicine at a school
but learned from a shikka guru (educated teacher) by practicing alongside him.
Nowadays he treats people in his area, does some business, and has a few nurseries
where he grows herbal plants. Similar to Afaz Uddin, Farhan’s early successes in
this line of work were with the cultivation and sale of aloe vera. He and a friend
(whose father was a kobiraj) started planting aloe vera in 1981. At that time, there
were no herbal markets or herbal shops in Kholabaria. So Farhan travelled to differ-
ent markets around the country to sell his plants. He started selling aloe vera to
ferriwallahs (street vendors) in Dhaka who made aloe vera shorbot (a medicinal
drink made from crushing the aloe vera into a juice and mixing it with water) to sell
to garment workers in Gazipur and parts of Dhaka. Aloe vera shorbot is known for
its cooling properties and is also used to treat jaundice.
Nowadays, Farhan still mainly grows aloe vera which he sells and uses to make
shorbot. He hopes that the farmers’ samity (cooperative organization) will ask the
government to support them by establishing a refrigeration system in the village. It
takes 8 months to grow aloe vera plants. In the winter season the plants last for a
week after harvesting them but during the rainy season they are ruined easily. If
aloe vera plants aren’t refrigerated “they get noshto [ruined] and go bad in a day.”
Farhan explained that they are also forming a new samity (cooperative organiza-
tion) because some of the members in the current group weren’t paying their dues,
which included donating a percentage of their money from plant sales to the com-
mittee. In addition, they have formed a “kobiraj network” and use it to sell their
Medicinal Plants in Bangladesh: Planting Seeds of Care in the Weeds of Neoliberalism 81
medicines all over Bangladesh. Most of their medical plants are sold outside of
Dhaka, at the Thana (subdistrict) level, except for aloe vera which also sells well
in Dhaka (Fig. 2).
Farhan said that they sell medicines to individuals, to kobiraj, and to pharmaceu-
tical companies, both the traditional herbal medicinal companies (Unani and
Ayurvedic) and some allopathic companies which have started manufacturing
herbal medicines. These sales are not usually direct sales, but are sold through mid-
dlemen, through a secretive process that I explain below.
Shantu, from CHH, clarified that herbal medicine manufacturing companies are
only interested in buying a few types of plants like bashok (Gendarussa vulgaris)
and tulsi (basil) and that there is not much of a market for other medicinal plants.
I asked Farhan Kobiraj if he feels that sales of herbal medicine in the Kholabaria
area had decreased since they have to compete with all the packaged herbal medi-
cines sold by companies. Farhan replied, “The difference is that we don’t have the
money to buy the machines to make our medicines, we have to do it by hand.” If
kobiraj make medicines themselves, they don’t need a manufacturing license. Even
so, he said that both his medicines and mass-manufactured medicines have the same
effects. The difference is that he doesn’t have all the machines to make medicines
presently nicely in packaged forms of tablets, capsules, and boxes. Later he contra-
dicted what he said earlier about the different types of medicines being the same,
saying “herbal companies give the name herbal but don’t actually put herbs in their
medicines…they use ‘hormones’ and we make medicines from the original plants.”
The irony is that he and other kobiraj and herbal farmers are trying to sell their
82 K. McNamara
medicinal plants to the very same companies that he is criticizing. Perhaps there is
truth in his accusation that the companies use chemicals and hormones, or perhaps
his accusation stems from his frustration about the small number of companies that
are buying plants from him and others in the area. Either way, his frustration voices
the challenges of surviving as a medicinal plant farmer with the commodification of
medicinal plants, many sold to the ever-expanding herbal pharmaceutical manufac-
turing companies seen across the world, from the Himalayas to Mexico to Tanzania
(Banerjee 2009; Bode 2006; Cho 2000; Craig and Glover 2009; Craig 2012; Hayden
2003; Hsu 2009; Janes 1999; Langwick 2010; McNamara 2014; Ndhlala et al.
2011; Saxer 2013; Wahlberg 2008).
Farmers in Bangladesh usually do not sell their medicinal plants directly to a
drug manufacturing company, but to traders who act as middlemen. Because com-
panies are secretive about where and from whom they buy their plants and raw
materials, it is hard to know the original source. Shahidullah explains how this
secretive process works:
A medicinal plant-collecting agent from Natore reported that he is selling Misridana,17 Voi
kumra powder18 and Shimulmul19 to some herbal arothdars (wholesalers) in Khatunganj
Chittagong and Chakbazar, Dhaka. The price he charges them is arbitrary. “It depends all
on your negotiations, there is no set price level,” as he said. For years he has supplied such
materials to them but he does not know where and to whom they are supplying these, and
what is done with them eventually. At the same time, he also does the same thing with his
suppliers; he never lets them know where and to whom he is going to sell these and at what
price. (Shahidullah 2007: 123)
As this passage describes, many medicinal plant farmers have no way of know-
ing who or what companies end up using their plants. These farmers express a
desire to expand their market in order to get access to the herbal companies. At the
same time, they fear that if too many farmers start growing aloe and other medicinal
plants, the prices will drop or they won’t be able to sell their plants (Alam 2007). It
is estimated that over 650 different species of plants are used by the herbal medicine
sector in Bangladesh, which buys 80 % of their raw materials from the local market.
Although sold at local markets, most medicinal plants grown in Bangladesh are not
cultivated on commercial plantations, but are grown wildly. The South Asia
Enterprise Development Facility (SEDF) reports that approximately 90 % of medic-
inal plants used in Bangladesh are harvested from the wild. SEDF also estimates
that of the 20 plants most in demand, nearly 60 % are partially or fully imported.
Another survey estimated that 12,500 t of dried medicinal plants are sold from rural
areas in Bangladesh, compared to 5000 t of imported raw material. The amount paid
for the imported raw materials ($8 million) is more than that paid for the domestic
raw materials ($4.5 million), even though the quantity from abroad is less (Alam
2007: 186–187) (Fig. 3).
17
The Latin botanical name is Scoparia dulcis.
18
Known in English as elephant apple or Dillenia indica.
19
Known in English as cotton tree or Bombax ceiba.
Medicinal Plants in Bangladesh: Planting Seeds of Care in the Weeds of Neoliberalism 83
Around 30 farmers and sellers in Kholabaria are members of the Herbal Village
Samity (Association) in the area. The members are krishok (farmers) and kobiraj,
although more members are farmers. This association, formed in 2003, is also
known as Laxmipur Khulabaria Oushadi Krishak Samity or “Laxmipur Khulabaria
Medicinal Plants Farmers Association.” This association was formed because farm-
ers had found that the pikers, beparies, and their middlemen were not giving them
a fair price for their plants. Pikers are the people who buy plants from the farmers
(or collectors) and sell them to the beparies, who then sell the plants to wholesalers
or processors at the district level. There are approximately 350 interdistrict beparies
who buy plants from 6000 to 10,000 local collectors, pikers, and farmers (Alam
2007: 187). The profit margins of the middlemen (beparies and pikers) range from
59 to 139 % and the processors of medicinal plants buy them for 109–358 % more
than the farmers’ original asking price (Shahidullah and Haque 2010: 10). The
farmers formed the association to manage the marketing and selling of their plants
84 K. McNamara
20
The Latin botanical name is Gendarussa vulgaris.
21
The Latin botanical name is Withania somnifera.
Medicinal Plants in Bangladesh: Planting Seeds of Care in the Weeds of Neoliberalism 85
Fig. 4 Medicinal plants (aloe vera) on the grounds of a small farm, packed and ready to be
transported
After Shantu spoke, a farmer chimed in, “We sell plants very slowly, [then]
when we need taka (money) or when there is a need, we pick the plants and sell
them to hawkers.” Many of the farmers who engage in medicinal plant cultivation
are poor and almost landless or have homestead gardens, like those that CHH is
promoting. Studies have shown that most farmers use the medicinal plants as cash
crops and that they tend to cultivate plants that do not take long to grow and that
can generate cash quickly if need be (Shahidullah and Haque 2010). These farmers
are depending on the sale of their medicinal plants for their livelihood, but because
of the system of middlemen, they do not often get the full potential value for their
plants. The self-sufficiency of these farmers is also contingent on the herbal drug
manufacturing companies to buy the plants and on organizations like CHH to help
them negotiate better prices.
CHH employees often discussed the lack of government policies to support health-
care and specifically herbal and traditional medicines. While they are critical of the
existing policies, they actively advocate for the government to support the herbal
86 K. McNamara
Shantu’s comment about the lack of policy regarding herbal and traditional
medicine is not completely valid. There is a government policy, but is not always
followed or fulfilled, and many stakeholders in traditional medicine critique it. The
government’s interest in traditional medicine has focused more on the production
and sales of herbal medicines than on the institutions associated with these tradi-
tions. In 2005, the Development of Biotechnology and Environmental Conservation
Centre (DEBTEC) organized a workshop titled “Medicinal and Aromatic Plants for
Life and Livelihood.” This workshop was also sponsored by three other ministries:
the Ministry of Science and Information and Communication Technology (ICT),
the Ministry of Forest and Environment, and the Ministry of Planning. Speakers at
this conference rallied for the government and private sector to promote the cultiva-
tion of medicinal plants. They claimed that at that time Bangladesh had to import
90 % of its herbs for herbal medicine. Speakers also predicted that if Bangladesh
could increase its production of herbal medicine, the country could meet national
demands, earn a large amount of foreign currency, and create income for the rural
people who would cultivate the medicinal plants. In addition, participants proposed
that rural cultivation would give rural people who cannot afford medicine access to
herbal remedies.23
Four years later, in 2009, the Ayurvedic Aushad Shilpa Samity (the Ayurvedic
Medicine Manufacturing Board) sponsored a seminar addressing the problems and
prospects of exporting medicinal plants and herbal products. At this seminar, the
commerce minister at the time stated, “We will take steps to declare the herbal
medicinal sector as a thrust sector and offer 15 % incentives against exports. But
22
Forms of traditional medicine practiced in Bangladesh.
23
http://archive.thedailystar.net/2005/01/06/d50106060168.htm. Accessed 6/12/16. “Promote
medicinal plants Speakers tell workshop.” January 6, 2005.
Medicinal Plants in Bangladesh: Planting Seeds of Care in the Weeds of Neoliberalism 87
before going for export, the sector should concentrate on winning consumers in the
domestic market. The sector will have to manufacture standard quality medicine.”24
In 2012, the Bangladeshi government reported that the herbal medicine market had
been growing steadily since 1980, when there were around Tk 1 crore (~$206,000)
sales of herbal medicine in Bangladesh. There were over Tk 1000 crore (~$128 mil-
lion) of sales in herbal medicine in 2010 and sales are predicted to be above 2500
crore (~$320 million) by 2020. In light of these upward trends, Bangladesh’s
Industry Minister at the time claimed that “the use of natural medicine, free from
side effects, would have to be increased to ensure sound health for all.”25 He has also
promised that the government would create policies to support the Unani and
Ayurvedic medicine industry so that the country can create more jobs and earn for-
eign exchange. These policies included a VAT (value added tax) exemption on
Unani, Ayurvedic, and other herbal products since February 2005.26
CHH wants more government support for their herbal initiatives because there
are few NGOs that work in the herbal sector. According to Shantu, “the donors
don’t have funding in this sector as they do for other sectors, such as reproductive
health, family planning, HIV/AIDS—they donate huge amounts to these other sec-
tors. The government also doesn’t have funding for our ‘theme.’ But this is an
emerging issue. This type of three-dimensional output can’t be found in any other
program, can it?” I asked him what he meant by output and he replied that, “I can’t
have this much output if I do a credit program, not even if I do business or health
rights program. But we have economic benefits in this program. At the same time
many things that are good for health are being done in this program. This is a field
with lots of opportunities that can’t be found in any other program.” In 2007, CHH
organized a national conference on herbal medicine that 400–450 people attended,
including traditional practitioners and representatives from pharmaceutical compa-
nies. A goal of the meeting was to encourage the government to change their policy
on herbal medicine. With government support and funding, CHH envisions increas-
ing their size and expanding their work.
Not everyone believes that politicians will keep their promises to promote tradi-
tional medicine. Since many government positions are political appointments, every
successive wave of political change means that the winning party appoints new
crops of politicians. Some CHH workers had faith that a change might come with
the upcoming election happening at that time, that the new government would
develop and support “Alternative Medical Systems.” They emphasized that they
must ally with other stakeholders to create a movement to hold the government
accountable. Faiz shared with me the exasperation many people have over the ongo-
ing political struggles in Bangladesh in the following statement:
24
http://archive.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=80162. Accessed 7/19/13.
“Government Promises to Boost Herbal Sector.” The Daily Star. March 18, 2009.
25
http://archive.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=234863. Accessed 7/6/2013.
“Herbal medicine market to cross Tk 2,500 crore by 2020.”
26
http://archive.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=94558. Accessed 11/15/2013.
“Unani medicine makers decry VAT in new budget.”
88 K. McNamara
Political decisions only happen when there is a need for them and change only happens
once there is a change in this scenario. Therefore, change related to [traditional] medical
treatment will not happen. The arrangements for treatment are a part of the continuation of
the government’s activities…No matter what government comes, what will they change?
His views capture the lack of faith and his frustration in political change that will
benefit the work of CHH. On one visit to the CHH project in their field office, staff
members were preparing for a visit from some government officials. CHH workers
asked me to give feedback about their project so that if the government officials
found any mistakes they could say that “a bideshi [foreign] woman visited the proj-
ect and she liked it.” The health minister had said that the government was interested
in using the work of CHH as a pilot study for 6 months. If they found the program
to be successful, then CHH might, under the auspices of the government, be able to
do lots of work in many upazillas (subdistricts). Akash thought that this publicity
and support from the government would initiate increased funding from donors who
would see that “we are doing very good work.” The interactions between CHH and
the government reflect the complex political negotiations between NGOs, the peo-
ple who are the object of their work, and the government.
Conclusion
The critiques and desires of Community Herbal Healthcare (CHH), the community
healing nongovernmental organization described in this chapter, demonstrate how
the political meaning of their work unfolds in specific ways due to the postcolonial
context of Bangladesh where social services were never completely developed or
provided to all its citizens. The Bangladeshi state continues to yield to a neoliberal
influence as healthcare policies are determined by the agendas of aid donors, and as
healthcare is increasingly provided by private organizations, such as NGOs. The
Bangladeshi state is also promoting the self-sufficiency of the nation through a push
to expand the production and export of medicinal plants and to decrease the depen-
dency on imports of medicinal plants for manufacturing herbal medicines.
Similar ideas of self-sufficiency are echoed in the philosophies of CHH, which
encourages self-care at the same time as it critiques the commercialization of health-
care and the failure of the state to provide healthcare for all its citizens. Its focus on
self-sufficiency and self-care could be understood simply as a part of the national
and business push for self-sufficiency. In this view, individuals are seen as rational
economic actors who are responsible for their own healthcare. In some ways, CHH
validates this rationale by encouraging villagers to solve their health problems by
becoming responsible for their own healing with medicinal plants. This rationale
becomes problematic when the blame and responsibility for ill health is placed on
villagers who cannot always choose the best healthcare option because their access
is limited by availability and cost. CHH sees the limitations of its work: although
medicinal gardens can improve the lives of villagers, they still don’t have access to
other forms of healthcare, including basic government health services. CHH also
discusses how they want their projects to be incorporated by government health
Medicinal Plants in Bangladesh: Planting Seeds of Care in the Weeds of Neoliberalism 89
schemes. CHH promotes self-healing not just for individuals but for whole
communities by calling for a change in the way Bangladeshi people are governed.
The call for state support is a way that populations often show that they want to be
recognized as in need of “governance” in order to gain access to state resources, aid,
and protection. As Chatterjee writes, “This is an equally crucial part of the politics
of the governed: to give the empirical form of a population group the moral attri-
butes of a community” (Chatterjee 2004: 57).
The success of medicinal plant cultivation by Afaz Uddin and other farmers in
Kholabaria did not originate in “development” schemes, but in their own creative
initiatives. Because of their success, various development schemes like CHH and
state discourses are co-opting Afaz’s story as a new model for “sustainable develop-
ment” which will lead to self-sufficiency and self-care. The creation of a develop-
ment “model” is in one sense a contradiction of Afaz’s ingenuity, symbolized in the
pagla name given to him. His “half-mad” life propagating aloe vera has become
normalized by NGO and government initiatives to shape and develop a replicable
model for herbal plantations. Even so, these models could perhaps be “new and bet-
ter ways of thinking about practices of government and how they might be linked in
new ways to the aspirations and demands of the economically and socially margin-
alized people who constitute the majority of the population in much of the world”
(Ferguson 2010: 170). When I left Bangladesh in 2009, the government was not yet
supporting the demands and requests of grassroots organizations like the Kholabaria
Samity. Instead it is CHH and other nongovernmental organizations that are making
up for the lack of government health services, as they negotiate between farmers,
villagers, and pharmaceutical companies. The economic self-sufficiency of the
farmers and villagers is dependent on the expansion of the herbal pharmaceutical
industry to buy their medicinal plants and on NGOs like CHH to help negotiate the
unequal market. At the same time, CHH imagines the possibility of a new art of
government that takes inspiration from Afaz’s ingenuity to develop new herbal
healthcare schemes accessible and beneficial to all people.
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Shaping Strong People: Napo Runa
Therapeutic Narratives of Medicinal Plant Use
Nora C. Bridges
Introduction
1
Samay and its role in health and well-being among Napo Runa are described in more detail below.
N.C. Bridges (*)
Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
e-mail: ncb25@pitt.edu
mechanism through which strong bodies are built through common social effort and
a domain around which therapeutic narratives are crafted. In this chapter, I will
analyze the continuing importance of medicinal plant use2,3 for Napo Runa.
Medicinal plants continue to be appealed to because they are meaningfully
aligned with local conceptions of health and illness in that they aid in the construc-
tion of strong people. Bouts of illness are described as resulting from weakness and
often the word wañui (“death” in Kichwa) is employed, indicating a loss of vivacity.
To combat this, the reasons Napo Runa give for the efficacy of medicinal plants are
directly tied to their ability to restore samay. Medicinal plants are considered capa-
ble of replenishing samay because of their properties such as bitterness and accord-
ing to the strength of the person preparing the medicine. In contrast, through
interviewing Napo Runa women and men, it became clear that the offerings of the
local rural clinics (subcentros de salud) are insufficient from their perspective
because many of the medicines offered there do not bolster strength but merely calm
symptoms. For instance, one 32-year-old father of small children, said:
The doctors don’t cure anything. They only give the same medicines. They don’t cure. The
doctors don’t cure, they only calm (the symptoms). Every time we go (to the rural clinic),
they give acetaminophen, the same, the same, the same.
2
Sacha ambi literally means “forest medicine” in the Kichwa language (Runa Shimi), although I
will be using this term to describe medicinal plants procured from a variety of locations beyond the
forest proper, including home gardens and alongside rivers.
3
In considering the implications of producing research and displaying results that deal with infor-
mation such as plant names that might be vulnerable to biopiracy and violations of intellectual
property rights, I follow Alexiades’s suggestion to only include species “whose ethnobotanical use
has already been published and thus rendered public in a previous publication…that is, plant
resources and knowledge whose potential status as a community-owned commodity has not been
jeopardized by a prior publication are not identified in the following discussions” (1999: 54). All
plant species that appear here have been previously researched and published by other scholars.
Shaping Strong People: Napo Runa Therapeutic Narratives of Medicinal Plant Use 95
themselves and thereby restore or maintain health and wellness. Specifically, they
make productive use of the information garnered in the clinical encounters, espe-
cially diagnoses. In this chapter, I describe how engagements with cultural outsiders
in settings of medical pluralism and market integration are pursued by Napo Runa
to explore their own health statuses. To better understand themselves, they interact
with different “others.” Emergent are two concurrent themes: (1) health and illness
are never just biological events, as they are mitigated via social ties which direct the
flow of samay and (2) the construction of the body is instrumental to local concep-
tions of health. To explore these themes, I investigate how Napo Runa use their
corpus of traditional local ethnomedical knowledge and praxis to handle problems
by making use of alterity.
Traditional local ethnomedical knowledge has long been regarded by anthro-
pologists not as static and fixed but instead it is dynamic, flexible, and receptive to
innovation. These systems of beliefs (kosmos), knowledge (corpus), and practices
(praxis) (Toledo 2002) are critical in the management of health and illness and in
the creation of healthy environments and bodies. In Amazonian Ecuador, the ways
that Napo Runa use medicinal plants are premised on the rapid environmental
change and increasing engagements with cultural outsiders.
Imbibing plant remedies is not considered to be an isolated and singular event
that transpires solely when illness strikes. Rather, Napo Runa consider the use of
natural medicine as a strengthening agent that aids in the growth of a fully func-
tional person capable of addressing life’s challenges, including the rapid environ-
mental and economic change they are experiencing that has profound effects on
their life projects. Bodies are constructed through the incorporation of extraneous
material contributed by various people. Here, we see that bodies are made—they are
shaped through the circulation of substances, including samay, words of advice,
medicinal plants, and food. Substances such as these flow along social channels.
Therefore, enjoying good health has as much to do with the richness of social rela-
tions as it does with bodily physiology alone.
In these times of increasing uncertainty, the demand for strong people is rising.
Documenting talk surrounding medicinal plant use illuminates how people mar-
shal their ethnomedical knowledge and derive meaning from forces operating at
wider scales of influence. Therapeutic narratives are key in the telling of not only
the etiology of why one falls ill but also what their course of action towards healing
says about themselves (Early 1982; Frank 1995; Mattingly 1994; Sherman 2001).
While there is much medical anthropological work on illness narratives (Ezzy
2000; Jucecic 2012; Kleinman 1988; Vickers 2012), less research has been focused
on examining therapeutic narratives. Through therapeutic narratives, local consul-
tants are invited to demonstrate how life events and environmental exposures
become embodied and reflected in the steps taken to restore health. In addition, the
therapeutic narratives that people deploy can become springboards for assessing
their lifeways as valuable. Indeed, following Kleinman and Kleinman “bodily
complaints could also be interpreted as a form of resistance against local sources
of oppressive control” (1994: 716). For instance, Napo Runa often insert discus-
sions of medical pluralism, resource extraction, migrant wage labor, cash cropping
96 N.C. Bridges
and market integration, and a growing nutrition transition into their therapeutic
narratives of m edicinal plant use. Therapeutic narratives about plant use situate
bodies in contexts of lived experience by drawing on historic, sociopolitical, and
environmental realities of the people crafting them.
Below, I analyze Napo Runa therapeutic narratives of plant use: first, to demon-
strate how bodies are constructed over time through the circulation of various sub-
stances; second, to explore how therapeutic narratives contribute to “micro-myths”
(Uzendoski 2012) or familial history and their interactions in particular environ-
ments; and third, to examine what recourses are pursued in the face of health haz-
ards incurred during entanglements with alterity (Kirksey 2012; Tsing 2005). These
three foci underscore how people talk about plants used for healing and curing and
the ways in which those therapeutic narratives provide insights into the social
underpinnings of how bodies are constructed, how people create meaning from their
history by drawing on connections to specific relatives and specific places, and
finally how oppression and bodily harm are contested through therapeutic narratives
that valorize the local ethnomedical system. I conclude that therapeutic narratives
reveal selective engagements with alterity—both social interactions with cultural
outsiders and with external material substances such as medicinal plants. These
strategic collaborations help them make sense of heterogeneous worlds in ways that
create space for their ethnomedical practices.
Napo Province, Ecuador is located in the Upper Amazon (Andean Piedmont), at the
headwaters of a main tributary to the Amazon River, the Rio Napo. This region in
the Andean-Amazonian corridor is a well-known biodiversity hot spot (Myers et al.
2000), frequently attributed to its high rainfall and volcanic soils. Napo Province is
emblematic of processes taking place across the Amazon. In contemporary
Amazonia, conservation and natural resource extraction (Gerlach 2003; Sawyer
2004; Büscher and Davidov 2013) often transpire side-by-side. In Napo, oil compa-
nies are intensifying petroleum exploration and extraction. At the same time, eco-
tourist enterprises premised on conservation, run by foreigners and indigenous
people alike (Harrison 2002), mutually exist with extractive efforts. There are also
government programs, such as “Socio Bosque,” implemented through the Ministry
of Environment, which seek to remunerate families for their efforts in not extracting
from forests. In addition, the national health care system includes elements of access
to health care for all, health education, and the delivery of intercultural services. All
of these extra-local forces, whether medical pluralism, market integration, resource
extraction, or conservation efforts, touch the everyday experiences of Napo Runa
communities. This chapter privileges the under-solicited narratives of Napo Runa in
order to understand how their use of medicinal plants connects to larger contexts of
power relations.
Shaping Strong People: Napo Runa Therapeutic Narratives of Medicinal Plant Use 97
Napo Runa
Napo Runa are one of many indigenous groups residing in the Amazonian region of
Ecuador, referred to as the Oriente. Other groups include the Achuar, Andoa,
Zápara, Cofánes/A’i, Secoya, Shiwiar, Shuar, Tagaeri, Teromenane, and the
Waorani. In a country with 7 % of the population self-identifying as indigenous
(although indigenous population estimates reach 40 % (PAHO 2006)), Napo is
remarkable because it is the only Ecuadorian province to have a majority of resi-
dents (56.8 %) who self-identify as indigenous (Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y
Censos 2010). Moreover, in the past decade, this proportion of self-reported indig-
enous people in Napo has actually increased (it was 54.9 % in the 2000 census).
Napo Runa are Kichwa-speaking and many also speak Spanish. The Quechua
languages spoken in Ecuador are referred to as “Kichwa.” Kichwa has been classi-
fied according to various schemas. Specifically, Ecuadorian Kichwa is variously
labeled as Quechua A (Parker 1969), Quechua II (Torero 1974), and Peripheral
Quechua (Mannheim 1991). There is major dialectical division between the Kichwa
spoken in the highlands and the Kichwa spoken in the Amazonian region. Moreover,
there is considerable variation among the subdialects. For instance, there are signifi-
cant differences in language between the two Amazonian provinces with large pop-
ulations of Kichwa-speakers, Napo and Pastaza. Within Amazonian Kichwa, Orr
and Wrisely classify three dialects: Tena, Loreta-Avila, and Bobananza-Puyo (1981:
iii–iv). The study population represented here speaks the Tena dialect.
Napo Runa lifeways include agriculture, hunting, fishing, and gathering. In addi-
tion, there is considerable market integration with increasing numbers of adults
searching for wage labor jobs. The rapid contemporary changes are not entirely new
phenomena, as Napo Runa are no strangers to interactions with culturally different
“others.” For instance, they have dealt with missionaries in the middle sixteenth
century, extractive industries including the rubber trade in the nineteenth century,
agricultural reform initiated in the highlands relocated colonos to the lowlands in
the 1960s, and a resurgence in oil exploration and extraction has accelerated in ear-
nest in recent decades. What is striking is that throughout time, in the face of centu-
ries of change and colonialism they have crafted creative adaptations that enable
their traditional local ethnomedical knowledge to persist.
In recent decades, much general descriptive ethnographic work has been pub-
lished on Runa in Pastaza (for example: Whitten and Whitten 2008; Nuckolls 2010)
and Napo (for example Uzendoski 2005, Muratorio 1991). Additional inquiries
range from political structure and governance (Erazo 2013; Wilson 2010), to lin-
guistic anthropological work (Nuckolls 1996), to considerations for a multispecies
ethnography (Kohn 2013). Although there is a great emphasis on songs (Swanson
2009; Harrison 1989) and myths (Uzendoski 1999; Uzendoski and Calapucha-
Tapuy 2012) in the literature, normal everyday conversation around plants and
health is under-analyzed. The contribution I present here are the quotidian stories
Napo Runa tell about how plants influence their bodies and health, which in turn
gives us a glimpse into how they navigate their medically pluralistic healthscape.
98 N.C. Bridges
Methods
This study was carried out in two contiguous communities, with nearly 300 resi-
dents in total. The research strategy included a mix of qualitative and quantitative
data collection techniques. I draw on data collected through archival research and
document collection, extensive informal interviewing and participant observation
(DeWalt and DeWalt 2011), surveys, formal elicitation techniques and free-lists
(Quinlan 2005), in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with 65 Runa
women and men (aged 18–78), home garden and kitchenspace inventories, and sys-
tematic forest walks with key consultants to gather data on medicinal plants. I con-
ducted all quantitative and qualitative interviews, collected documents, and engaged
in participant observation in both Kichwa and Spanish.
This study was carried out in two contiguous communities, with nearly 300 resi-
dents in total. These communities are located on a two-lane highway, approximately
15 km outside of the provincial capital of Tena. The communities share similar
leadership structure, each has a playing field (cancha cubierta) where community
members often congregate and interact, and both have communal meeting build-
ings. One of the two communities also has a bilingual school and a chapel on-site.
These two study communities were purposefully selected because they are located
directly on the road to the provincial capital. The communities stretch along both sides
of the road for about a kilometer each way, away from the center of the community that
has the cancha cubierta and other institutions. This layout has an undeniable effect on
the residents’ interactions with wider scales of influence, including engagements with
medical pluralism, resource extraction, and migrant labor. When I accompanied inter-
locutors to their natal communities, for instance, I was acquainted with the diversity of
shapes that rural Kichwa communities may take. Many of the more distal communities
are arrived to by a single, often unpaved, road. There, houses encircle a playing field
and some community structures, as opposed to straddling a provincial highway.
Given these varying physical layouts, there are demographic implications for the
livelihood strategies of the people living in the communities. For example, in a com-
munity that was approximately 40 min by bus from the provincial capital, a majority
of the men are migrant workers, while women live in the community full-time. The
men return only infrequently. Over an hour bus ride from the provincial capital is
another community where few people live. This is because husband-wife pairs and
their children are living on their farms (fincas), rather than in the community proper,
which only draws people during fiestas.
Background
Despite living in a biodiversity hot spot, life in Upper Amazonia for indigenous women
and men is characterized by altered physical environments due to a proliferation of
extractivist industries ranging from logging and mining to petroleum exploration.
Shaping Strong People: Napo Runa Therapeutic Narratives of Medicinal Plant Use 99
These phenomena are transforming people’s engagements with the forest, river, and
garden environments. Also transformed are healthscapes, the “subjective vision of a
landscape’s medical resources and institutions, limited by cost and accessibility and
shaped by the uneasy coexistence of Western and indigenous medical systems” (Gold
and Clapp 2011: 93). In many cases, this environmental change is narrowing access to
resources for health, most notably medicinal plants for the provision of home-based
health care. Napo Runa consultants report that the severely altered environments they
live and work in have created insecure healthscapes for them in terms of less available
time and worse health habits such as sedentism and dietary shift.
With the construction of roads come massive industry trucks and bus traffic con-
necting the rural areas to the provincial capital. These vehicles barreling down the
road at frequent intervals have created more danger and noise, which consultants
say are scaring away animals and leaving pollution in their wake. These roads also
help people get to their wage labor jobs, which they are increasingly compelled to
have to make ends meet. This leads to less time available to procure and prepare
sacha ambi. In addition, nutrition transitions are also of dire concern (Dufour and
Bender 2012). Important and timely work has been done on this in the Ecuadorian
Amazonian context (Sorensen and Houck 2013; Albán 2013). I had many conversa-
tions revolving around the general concern about dietary practices transitioning
away from hunted game, captured fish, and collected and cultivated fruits and veg-
etables to purchased foods such as white rice and tinned meat. The two shifts in
resources—less time and more processed food—conspire to create more illness and
depletion of samay.
Given these circumstances, Napo Runa are pushed to reinterpret their health
needs and to rely upon their local ethnomedical knowledge. Rather than eschewing
their ethnomedical system, it is clear that Napo Runa are marshaling their knowl-
edge and experience with medicinal plants in creative ways. Moreover, their local
ethnomedical knowledge is not value-neutral in that therapeutic narratives reveal
fundamental conceptions of how they view themselves and the relationships within
which they are embedded.
Contemporary work with Napo and Pastaza Runa details how the language they
use and the stories they tell are mechanisms to contextualize their own lives in a way
that encourages the listener’s own experiences. That is, through storytelling, con-
crete memories offered by the speakers can give rise to the memories of key life
experiences held by the listeners as well (Nuckolls and Swanson 2014: 49). Nuckolls
and Swanson refer to this as earthy concreteness and anti-hypotheticalism (2014).
Rather than using generalizations, Napo Runa share concrete experiences that situ-
ate their perspectives. In interviews concerning medicinal plants, I found this
“earthy concreteness” to be central to the therapeutic narratives that detail how
people make decisions while navigating the healthscape (Fig. 1).
Napo Runa have multiple recourses when one falls ill. Eduardo Kohn distin-
guishes between “sacha ambi,” referring to mostly natural medicine using tradi-
tional resources from various environments, and “llakta ambi,” indicating purchased
biomedical substances (1992: 7). This same distinction arose during my own inves-
tigation, nearly 20 years after Kohn published his work on the medical culture of
100 N.C. Bridges
Fig. 1 Supplies and medication brought by international health brigade during a “service trip.”
(Photo by N. Bridges)
Runa in Avila. On the one hand, Napo Runa boast a variety of medical specialists.
For example, shamans, known as yachaks (glossed as “the one who knows”), are
ambiguous figures (Kohn 1992: 32) in that they can both cause harm and cure. At
the same time there are traditional midwives (parteras) and most people in the study
sites engage in plant use for health reasons. On the other hand, there are both private
and public hospitals available in the provincial capital, as well as numerous clinics,
naturopathic stores, and pharmacies. Occasionally biomedical health professionals
travel to the rural communities, whether during outreach days sponsored by local
clinics or during service trips undertaken by international health brigades. Napo
Runa employ a great variety of treatments to combat commonly suffered illnesses,
such as diarrhea, cough, vomiting, skin rashes, headaches, and bodily aches as well
as mal viento (wayrashka in Kichwa). Napo Runa use medicinal plants in multiple
concoctions as well as appeal to specialists, whether “traditional” or “biomedical.”
Often multiple recourses are sought concurrently.
Health and the Body
historical and cultural processes (Turner 1995; Brotherton and Nguyen 2013).
Power relations are often implicated in the formation of local bodies. That is, some
illnesses may appear precisely because of social and political processes that have
tangible effects on particular bodies.
Not only are the social origins of disease critical, but medical anthropologists
must also center attention on the social origins of therapeutic choices. In this way,
some treatment methods may, in effect, construct distinctive locally embedded bod-
ies by virtue of the incorporation of heterogeneous material in the form of medicinal
plants. Anthropologists have documented how this is accomplished according to
social ties and in a processual manner. The incorporation of outside materials is
facilitated by social ties, exemplified by the concept of the “dividual,” as advanced
by Marilyn Strathern. The “dividual” is a conceptual tool that aids in understanding
how social processes become reflected in particular bodies. As Strathern states,
bodies are constructed through the sharing of substances: “persons exist by absorb-
ing heterogeneous material influences” (1988: 348).
Hence, bodies are constructed processually. Bruno Latour considers acquiring a
body as a progressive enterprise. Latour states that “to have a body is to learn to be
affected, meaning ‘effectuated, moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or
non-humans’ (2004: 205). In Latour’s model, there are three components: (a) a
body, meaning a subject; (b) a world, meaning objects (for our purposes here, plants
as medicine); and (c) an intermediary, meaning language, which connects the world
and the subject (for our purposes here, therapeutic narratives). While Latour
describes how acquiring a body is to hone it as a sensory medium, for Napo Runa
the body is conceptualized as being constructed through various engagements with
alterity—social relations with cultural outsiders and the circulation of material
externalities—to themselves. In the context of Amazonia, ethnographers working
with various indigenous groups note that persons are produced through substance
sharing with the ever-present possibility of transformation (McCallum 1996; Rival
2005; Santos-Granero 2012). Furthermore, real kinship is thought to come about by
the sharing of substances and the persistent memory of past acts of caring (Gow
1991). For Napo Runa, plants are integral in constructing both personhood and
strong bodies in the management of health. Napo Runa create bodies through circu-
lating substances, particularly plant medicines, along kinship lines in social connec-
tions woven of loving care. The taking in of plant medicines not only produces
certain kinds of distinctive bodies, but also is a platform from which to discuss the
reasoning behind such medical choices—an opportunity to devise and share mean-
ingful therapeutic narratives.
Based on long-term fieldwork with the Yanesha of the montaña in Eastern Peru,
Santos-Granero demonstrates how bodies in Upper Amazonia are composites cre-
ated through socializing behaviors of human and nonhuman entities. He juxtaposes
102 N.C. Bridges
In his work with the Yanesha, Santos-Granero provides evidence that plants are
implicated in these people-making processes. For example, he has documented
plants that are useful in fabricating successful male hunters and successful female
gardeners. He has also noted that parents give their children a variety of plants “in
hopes of instilling in them the desired physical or psychological qualities” (Santos-
Granero 2012: 191).
Napo Runa also use particular plants because their appearance is suggestive of
the effects they desire to be brought about.4 Kohn provides an example of Heliconia
aemydiana, which is used by Avila Runa to help in childbirth (Kohn 1992: 10). The
heliconia is used to accelerate the birth process by opening up the vaginal canal
wider easing the birth by mimicking the dropping down of the heliconia. In addi-
tion, Napo Runa identify certain plants that are powerful agents of protection; for
instance, they report that although wayusa (Ilex guayusa) consumption is currently
declining, it used to be imbibed to ward off snake bites, a persistent concern while
working in the garden or forest. By drinking wayusa early in the morning, people
would absorb some of the plant’s strength prior to their day’s work.
Person-making is a struggle to construct bodies that reflect material and subjec-
tive qualities to shape capable and strong people. There is much in the literature
about the circulation of gendered objects among Napo Runa, such as game (aicha
yaya) and fermented manioc drink (asua mama), which reflect enacted bodily expe-
riences (Mezzenzana 2014; Uzendoski 2005). With the use of medicinal plants,
specifically, Napo Runa men and women are able to strengthen themselves and their
family members as well as deploy narratives of what these medicinal choices mean
for their identity assertions.
In addition, Napo Runa consider plants to have subjectivities, personas hidden
inside them. Having evolved from previously human states, plants are proof that the
world is in flux with the possibility of transformation. Plants are imbued with a rich
mythology and are treated as though they were “dangerous lovers or difficult chil-
dren” who had transformed and hardened into their current plant forms (Swanson
4
A notion in line with the Doctrine of Signatures.
Shaping Strong People: Napo Runa Therapeutic Narratives of Medicinal Plant Use 103
2009: 36). Plants such as ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) and wanduj (Brugmansia
suaveolens) are considered to be person-like in that they are “teachers” to those who
imbibe them (Uzendoski 2012). By using medicinal plants, alterity is incorporated.
The plants are a form of alterity in that they are materially “other” from the body
that takes them in and also they have separate subjectivities as well. Santos-Granero
(2012) envisions the installation of desired qualities to be both material (embodi-
ment) and concerning subjectivity (ensoulment). Napo Runa procure, prepare, cir-
culate, and use plant medicines in order to incorporate alterity—whether in physical,
material form or in the form of subjectivity.
The power that plants bestow is directly related to samay. Conducting long-term
ethnographic work in Pastaza, Norman Whitten tells us that “one’s samay carries
with it something of the force of one’s will…. invisible (to humans when awake)
and yet tangible proof of inner strength” (1985: 108–9). Moreover, samay is a finite
substance whose nature is to circulate. It is transferred through healing, dreaming,
and breathing on the head of someone who has suffered samay depletion. Through
these transactions, samay, like breath, is a way to animate through transferring “part
of a person’s powerful soul substance to someone else” (Muratorio 1991: 205). In
addition, this samay transference occurs processually throughout one’s lifetime.
The realm of medicine is replete with samay. The quintessential example of heal-
ing revolves around the image of an Amazonian Kichwa shaman (yachak) lending
strength to someone who is ill by blowing breath over his or her head. In addition,
samay is evident in varying degrees in a variety of medicines, biomedicine and
sacha ambi alike. For example, Knipper conducting research in Coca, Ecuador dis-
cusses how the perception of biomedical devices, specifically an “IV sugar drip,”
has to do “with samay and the Naporuna’s perception of body, self, soul, and per-
sonality” (Knipper 2006: 142). While the use of an IV was seen as efficacious,
acetaminophen is not because there is no flowing substance and the pills don’t
impart sensorial elements, such as bitterness, that indicate a condensed amount of
samay. This strengthening through samay is also evident in the medicinal plants that
people take in times of illness, yet it extends far beyond this as it continues to influ-
ence them throughout their lifetimes.
A glaring lacuna in the ethnographic work with Napo Runa as well as ethnobotany
in the Upper Amazonian region as a whole is that the narratives and verbal imagery
surrounding medicinal plant use are under-analyzed. The vast corpus of Napo Runa
ethnomedical knowledge and robust materia medica comprises diverse substances,
including but not limited to bark, sap, leaves, shoots, roots, flowers, fruits, as well
as insects and fungi. During free-listing exercises, 83 distinct medicinal plant rem-
edies were mentioned without prompting. Many consultants were dismayed at their
initial lists and told me that they would recognize and think of more species if they
were in the forest and were visually reminded by the plant’s presence which would
Shaping Strong People: Napo Runa Therapeutic Narratives of Medicinal Plant Use 105
Fig. 2 Plants cultivated in doorstep garden near the home (wasi pungu). (Photo by N. Bridges)
invite them to recall memories of their past use. This prompted me to follow up the
free-listing elicitations with systematic forest walks with key consultants. During
the forest walk phase, the number of distinct medicinal plant remedies increased to
102, a nearly 20 % increase.
Napo Runa procure plants in many ways. They can be cultivated by the home in
doorstep gardens (wasi pungu) or in agroforestry gardens (chagra). In addition,
plants may be collected from the wild, near the river or in the forest. Napo Runa also
prepare medicinal plants in a variety of ways, ranging from poultices to infusions to
fanning mechanisms to steam baths. Moreover, plants are often combined in elabo-
rate concoctions, employing multiple species in a single remedy (Fig. 2).
Often medicinal plant remedies are prepared in the household by the people who
intend to use them, or by those who are responsible for giving the medicine to s omeone
else (a parent would prepare medicine for her or his sick child, for example). Because
many people are spending more time away from the home in wage labor jobs, they do
not have the time to allocate towards procuring the medicine, which often entails
hours’ long hikes into the forest, let alone the time it takes to prepare the medicine. As
such, people have come to rely on other community residents, even if they are not
directly tied to them through consanguinity or even through compadrazgo relation-
ships. In the study communities, there are two people who make sacha ambi and
either give it away to their family members or compadres or sell it to more socially
distant community residents. I have observed that having less intimate social connec-
tions does not preclude one from accessing the sacha ambi. More socially distant
community residents may purchase sacha ambi from these burgeoning specialists.
106 N.C. Bridges
I observed one such example of this circulation of prepared sacha ambi. A woman
had been suffering debilitating stomach pains and decided to go visit a community
resident downriver who was known to prepare various medicines. There, she bought a
preparation of wambula for three US dollars. She brought the 1-L Coca-Cola bottle
filled with prepared medicine back home. Later in the evening, I stopped in to see how
she was doing. When I had arrived, she was conversing with her family members and
passing around the liter bottle for each person to drink from. Working in a different
context of the Ecuadorian highlands, Mary Weismantel notes that feeding makes kin
because those who eat together in the same household share the “same flesh in a quite
literal sense: they are made of the same stuff” (1995: 695). In a similar way, members
of this woman’s family were reportedly not suffering the same sort of physical ail-
ments that she was; yet nonetheless she shared the drink with them. This circulation,
initiated by the ill person herself, was a form of loving care. It ensured that the people
who were living with or near one another were indeed made of the same substance.
As reviewed above, indigenous Amazonians act to construct bodies through the incor-
poration of extraneous material, including plant medicines, in ways that are strength-
ening. The therapeutic narratives that people craft reveal the importance of social
interaction in the healing process, the “micro-myths” that lend earthy concreteness to
the history of how family members have cured one another using resources from their
traditional territory. Therapeutic narratives also can be indicative of political position-
ing—a vocal valorization of meaningful cultural practices, such as appealing to sacha
ambi in times of distress derived from engagements with alterity.
In Kichwa, shinzhi means strong. The morpheme -ya means “to become” while the
morpheme -chi means to make something or someone do or accomplish something.
Therefore, shinzhiyachina can be translated as “to cause to become stronger.”
Shinzhiyachina was given as rationale for why people appeal to medicinal plants.
As Michael Uzendoski has noted, “over the course of one’s life, one’s body must
change form and become strengthened” (2005: 54). There are notable elements of
plants that are considered to be more strengthening. Bitterness (ayaj) and burning
(ambichina) are sensorial elements that are thought to enhance the remedy’s effi-
cacy, to prove that the plants are working to restore health given their samay.
Acetaminophen, as mentioned earlier, does not have these characteristics and thus
is not interpreted as imparting samay.
Uzendoski had an example in mind when discussing the strengthening and trans-
formative ability of plants for bodies. He discusses how Runa are able to capture the
vital energy of mythical jaguars by consuming the puma yuyu plant. Kohn also had
Shaping Strong People: Napo Runa Therapeutic Narratives of Medicinal Plant Use 107
heard of this plant during his fieldwork, although he was unable to collect any speci-
mens (Kohn 1992: 37–38). Puma yuyu is said to work because the samay of jaguars
is ingested into the body. Furthermore, Uzendoski notes that it is best to take puma
yuyu from an early age “for its consumption constitutes a life process by which one
gradually gains more power” (Uzendoski 2005: 43). Eventually, one might be able
to become a powerful shaman (yachak) with the ability to shape-shift into a jaguar
or enter into a permanent jaguar state in death.
When Napo Runa call upon and circulate medicinal plants for health reasons, they
are operating from their understanding of samay. In particular, they are fulfilling
social obligations to help strengthen the bodies of the people they care for. Runa can
use plants in a variety of ways to increase the samay of people who are ailing, whether
they are physically ill or even if they have found themselves off-course in a moral
sense. For example, red peppers (uchu) are applied to eyes of children as a form of
punishment along with harsh words of advice (kamachina). In the interviews I con-
ducted, consultants said that kamachina is a necessity and it is never coming from a
place of anger but one of loving concern. Giving voice to her informant Yaya Alonso,
Blanca Muratorio documents how chile peppers (part of the genus capsicum in the
nightshade family, Solanaceae) are used as a form of simultaneous discipline and
care. Yaya Alonso recalls “When I was small, lazy, and disrespectful of grown-ups,
they would make any powerful person with a strong samay rub red peppers on me”
and give advice by “[sitting] me on a bench, scold[ing] me harshly, punish[ing] me
by rubbing my eyes with red pepper and later blow[ing] their strength and power into
me” (Muratorio 1991: 56). In addition to chile peppers, I have also observed the lash-
ing of bare legs with stinging nettles (chini) (Figs. 3 and 4).
Fig. 3 Stinging nettles next to state-issued textbooks on a school desk. (Photo by N. Bridges)
108 N.C. Bridges
Plants are also used to manipulate the flow of air outside of bodies. Napo Runa
use a fan assembled with aromatic leaves to lightly brush a person who has lost
samay and has become weak. When someone has fallen ill with mal viento
(wayrashka in Kichwa), someone with a lot of samay comes to fan away the “bad
wind” causing ill-health. The sensation is calming and therapeutic, cooling and aro-
matic. It is also conducted in a supportive social environment. The person with the
fan says words of kindness. I’ve witnessed prayers pleading for the restoration of
samay of the ill person, as well as people on the outskirts of the room recalling when
something similar happened to them and now they are stronger for it. They are shar-
ing concrete experiences both to contextualize how illness can be overcome and to
offer encouragement and support. This is a space of circulation—the sharing of
words of support, kindness, air, and samay (Fig. 5).
Throughout my fieldwork, I heard stories that illustrated people’s ties to place and
located them within kinship networks. Many of these also involved plants and heal-
ing. One such story, recounted and analyzed below, involved the strengthening attri-
bute of a plant, shinzhi-caspi, that, as local stories have it, allowed children to walk
who couldn’t before. The bodily transformation is remembered as the result of a
Shaping Strong People: Napo Runa Therapeutic Narratives of Medicinal Plant Use 109
past act of loving care. A consultant told me about a young girl who was still unable
to walk at 3 years of age. In response to this, her family became gravely concerned.
Her grandfather took her to the forest, where he found, prepared, and applied the
plant medicine to cure the child. Similar to the puma yuyu plant mentioned above,
shinzhi-caspi has transformative power. A child who was much belated in walking
was given shinzhi-caspi by her grandfather and was able to walk thereafter. This
plant appears in the ethnobiological literature, which notes that “when children
don’t walk soon place the leaves on the legs,” (Gallegos 1988: 44, my translation).
Despite her inability to walk until she was 3 years old, to this day the shinzhi-caspi
recipient herself and everyone in her family credit that plant as having long-term
strengthening capabilities lasting throughout her lifetime. It is no coincidence, they
say, that she is regarded as a powerful healer herself (paju-yuj).
In this therapeutic narrative, an emergent quality is one of familial memory—
memory of past acts of curing by relatives that occurred in particular places. Although
the story itself is important in fostering memory, so too are the remembrances of who
did the curing and the transformation of the body of the one who was cured. The
consultant who told me this story is a kachun, a woman who married into an ayllu
(extended kinship network). Thus, she is the cuñada (sister-in-law) of the woman
who was cured and was able to walk. These two women are similar in age, the one
recounting the story was 46 at the time of telling while the protagonist of the story
was 45. In the words of the woman recounting the story of her sister-in-law:
There was once a plant…but it was deep in the forest, in the very old forest. In the virgin,
pristine forest. You couldn’t find it here today. In the very deep forest, up the mountain was
110 N.C. Bridges
this plant. Abuelo Mariano, my husband’s grandfather, used to give this forest medicine to
children who couldn’t walk (wawaguna invalidu tukusha mana purijguna). He would walk
deep into the forest and would come upon one tree. The tree did not have many strong
branches (shinzhi caspi). He found one strong branch and took it with him. This tree was
standing alone. There was no one else.5 He took that strong branch, he pounded it and cre-
ated a drink. He gave the drink to the child who couldn’t walk. Then she began walking.
This story reveals the interrelations of specific families to the territories they cur-
rently and historically have inhabited. In this way, they keep track of how samay has
been circulated. This description demonstrates how therapeutic narratives locate
people in particular places and kinship networks. The next therapeutic narrative will
describe how bodies become transformed through social relations and political pro-
cesses, and are further transformed through selective curative action emphasizing
strengthening properties of plant medicine.
5
This specifically refers to how there was no other tree nearby: “Paylla shamun! Pis mana tiyaun.
Kaita pis pis pis illyan. Payshitulla!”
6
I have made every attempt to safeguard the identity and privacy of all the research participants
who generously shared their lives, perspectives, and experiences with me. As such, all names that
appear here are pseudonyms.
Shaping Strong People: Napo Runa Therapeutic Narratives of Medicinal Plant Use 111
drinks llushtinda muyu three times a day. The reason he does this is to counteract
high levels of toxicity detected during a visit to the community by a medical brigade.
He told me that medical tests showed high levels of intoxication from chemicals he
was exposed to in his work.
Edison was working as a fumigator for a banana plantation in a city that is a 6-h
bus ride away. He says that because he had direct and prolonged exposure to many
chemical products and pesticides often without adequate safety gear, he suffered
ill-health. It affected his health and productivity to such an extent that his supervisor
eventually switched his job to working with fertilizer rather than fumigation.
Here we see medical pluralism in action. The medical test’s detection of the
problem was useful to Edison. It signified that he needed to do something to heal
himself. In contrast to this diagnosis, the free pills that the medical brigade distrib-
uted were not quite so useful to him. Instead, he said:
I want to drink the llushtinda muyu because it is natural, I don’t need any more chemicals
in my body…this will clean my blood.
What I want to emphasize here is that the ethnomedical knowledge about appropriate
treatments with plants is chosen as an option to contend with larger economic pro-
cesses that have direct, and often violent, impacts on individual bodies. Ethnomedical
knowledge is leveraged to meet the challenges of contemporary times. In this instance,
Edison is resisting the ill-health he experiences while having to be a wage laborer.
Specifically, he is launching a therapeutic narrative of how his choice to use plants to
heal himself reaffirms the value of traditional ethnomedical knowledge and practice.
Conclusions
Illnesses and bodies are instruments through which to profess idioms of distress.
Therapeutic narratives are the medium through which these tales of distress are
deployed. In order to become a proper human being, Napo Runa realize that the self
is not given and that bodies are constructed through common effort. This common
effort coalesces around the integration of alterity to bolster samay (re-)circulation.
In this sense, the use of medicinal plants at once strengthens bodies and undergirds
social ties. Napo Runa make use of connections across cultural differences, includ-
ing biomedical treatment and wage labor. These connections lead to the emergence
of therapeutic narratives that validate the efficacy of plant medicine circulated along
kinship networks. Napo Runa are maneuvering within a nested matrix of power
relations, inter- and intraculturally, and are continuing to rely on traditional ethno-
medical knowledge and practice. We have come to see why, as described at the
beginning of this chapter, biomedical doctors don’t cure at rural clinics.
Most ethnobotanical work centers on a one-to-one correspondence of which par-
ticular plant is used by local groups for which particular ailment, often in hopes of
developing pharmaceuticals. This is often the case for ethnobotanical inquiry car-
ried out in Amazonia. The data presented here in this current chapter, however,
charts a different course. I have collected the narratives people deploy about them-
selves in their quest to regain or maintain health by focusing on therapeutic narra-
tives involving plant use. For Napo Runa, health is considered to be tied to the
circulation of samay. A state of ill-health is one suffering a dearth of samay. In
short, to regain it, Napo Runa people appeal to sacha ambi.
Medical anthropologists have long demonstrated that illnesses are instruments
through which to profess idioms of distress while enduring the effects of “li[ves]
lived harshly” (Oths 1999: 309). The results of this research indicate that not only
do Napo Runa explain illnesses in this manner, but they also explain their rationale
for plant use as political and social maneuvering. That is to say, Napo Runa are
actively using forest medicine to better themselves and their bodies and to contest
what ails them beyond biological pathogens by interpreting the effects wider sys-
tems of exploitation have on their bodies and health. Social relations are also illus-
trated through how the body is constructed. As we’ve seen, plants are given to young
children in order to formulate proper, functioning human beings. The effects of
plant medicine are considered to be strengthening throughout one’s lifetime, rather
than a simple one-off dosage.
Shaping Strong People: Napo Runa Therapeutic Narratives of Medicinal Plant Use 113
What are the implications for the continuing use of plant-based medicine in
Upper Amazonia? What does it mean that consultants report they continue to rely
on medicinal plants because it strengthens both their bodies and their social ties? In
the context of rapid and vast social, political, economic, and environmental change,
Napo Runa ethnomedical knowledge and praxis continue to persist. At the same
time, there is contemporary desire for economic development, road connectivity,
and prevalence of biomedical services, among other things, all of which are usher-
ing in the aforementioned rapid and vast change. These pull factors are met with
increased reliance on the traditional ethnomedical system. As Napo Runa report, the
more often they engage in intercultural, power-ridden interactions, whether with
biomedical specialists or with employers, they feel the need to construct healthful
bodies and take care of their social ties so as to mitigate anger and jealousy. Overing
and Passes (2000), writing on sociality, argue that for Amazonian indigenous peo-
ple, success is measured by the extent to which conviviality—meaning harmonious
social interactions in contrast to anger, jealousy, hate, and greed—is attained. This
tension, however, further implies that although there is increasing demand for sacha
ambi, there are also fewer resources, including the scarcity of plants themselves and
the lack of time necessary to procure, prepare, and circulate the remedies. In
response to this, some community residents are becoming new specialists who sell
forest medicine for a nominal fee to those who are unable to allocate the time neces-
sary to procure and process the plant medicine.
These findings suggest that indigenous people in the Upper Amazon consider
their health to be in a poor state and they express significant anxiety about the impli-
cations for their future health and impending environmental destruction. Yet they
continue to rely on forest medicine and traditional practitioners. Napo Runa are
vocal in their realization that they are unable to spend time in the gardens for food
and forest to collect medicinals. Instead, they are stretched thin with other priorities,
such as earning wages. However, despite feelings of more insecure healthscapes,
people continue to rely on and prefer medicinal plants. These preferences are in line
with their understandings of how the body works in addition to expressing their
understandings of the consequences of their social lives. Now more than ever is a
critical time to follow the impending impacts of shifting access to medicinal plants
in order to trace indigenous health outcomes as well as to better understand the
social and political processes that inform their therapeutic decision-making.
Acknowledgements This research was made possible through funding from the National Science
Foundation and Fulbright. I am grateful to Liz Olson for organizing the original panel at the 2014
AAA meetings where a version of this chapter was presented and for her efforts to organize this
book project. Thanks also to Rick Stepp for his comments delivered during our panel as well as the
ones he offers in this volume. In addition, I appreciate the valuable comments from an anonymous
reviewer, which I believe has made this chapter stronger. For her encouragement and insightful
comments along the way, I wish to thank my mentor Kathleen Musante. Finally, I express heartfelt
gratitude to my Napo Runa collaborators in the Ecuadorian Amazon. I am indebted to those who
not only devoted their time, energy, and care to answering my questions and teaching me about
plants and health, but who also included me in their daily lives and opened their homes to me.
Ashka pagarachu!
114 N.C. Bridges
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Using Plants as Medicines and Health Foods
in Southern Jalisco
Elizabeth A. Olson
Abstract This chapter deals with the incorporation of medicinal plant knowledge
in the practices of non-biomedical healers in west central Mexico. Ethnographic
data are presented to suggest that what occurs with the translation of health knowl-
edge across ethnomedical systems is more complex than existing explanations of
“cultural diffusion,” “cultural borrowing,” or “colonization” but instead reflects
important cultural constructivist dynamics: (1) embedded ethnomedical histories;
(2) predominant health culture; and (3) individual worldview. Non-biomedical prac-
titioners in contemporary Mexico adapt various ethnomedical texts and therapies to
their local environment and clientele. Ethnographic research in one Mexican town
is used to demonstrate the spectrum of practitioners whose experiences highlight
the interplay of these three dynamics. The spectrum of practitioners can help us
begin to construct more nuanced understandings of the translations of ethnomedical
knowledge across global networks. The incorporation of plants into the range of
non-biomedical practices is nutritional, supplemental, and sometimes medicinal.
Introduction
Combining the cultural diversity in our world with a continued fascination with the
“exotic other” and with the problematic health profiles of many Western nations
(i.e., epidemics of chronic and lifestyle diseases), we find a growing industry keen
to find the next “miracle-diet,” plant extract, or the “super foods” that will help us
eat as if we still lived in the “Paleolithic” (Pedersen and Baruffati 1985). It could
appear to the casual observer that we are just now discovering ancient cultural wis-
dom that will cure all that ails us. Medicinal plants are at the forefront of these
popular curiosities, though certainly these are not new interests for anthropologists
who have long been interested in studying medicinal plants, traditional environmen-
tal knowledge, and Indigenous knowledge. In fact, some scholars have suggested
that the search for “new” ethnobotanical-medicinal discoveries is all but over and
that the era of bioprospecting1 has come to a close (Cox 2000). Nonetheless, there
is a profound association between popular interest in adapting traditional wisdom to
solve modern problems and the proliferation of non-biomedical practices in all cor-
ners of the globe.
Medicinal plant knowledge ranks high on the list of interest, and in small-scale
societies, is guarded by specialists or practitioners, transmitted through texts and
oral instruction. In the current global era, the transmission of knowledge is as rapid
as the contact between cultures and societies from disparate locations. In this chap-
ter, I present ethnographic research on the incorporation of medicinal plants in non-
biomedical practices in the Autlán region of west central Mexico. I describe the
landscape of therapies in contemporary semirural Mexico and use that backdrop to
explore the cultural, economic, political, and individual aspects of non-biomedical
practices in Autlán, paying careful attention to the role that globalization has played
in shaping the various characteristics of these practices. I employ both interpretive
and critical approaches, looking at the stories of individuals and situating those in
wider global contexts—the anthropological art of “zooming in and zooming out.”
The main goal in this chapter is to consider how plants are operationalized in thera-
peutic contexts in various contemporary non-biomedical practices in Autlán. I sug-
gest that medical knowledge is actively translated by local practitioners to meet the
needs of their clientele, and that for some there is a heavy reliance on the curative
properties of plants, while for others the nutritional value of plants as foods is key.
To contextualize the medical services scene, I provide an overview of the history of
homeopathic practice in Mexico in relationship to the emergence of the current
Mexican biomedical healthcare system.
1
Bioprospecting refers to searching for plants and animal products that may have commercial
applications and has largely been an effort of Western researchers seeking Indigenous
knowledge.
Using Plants as Medicines and Health Foods in Southern Jalisco 119
However, I want to move beyond the explanation that healthcare usage is only a
matter of access. While there remains a question of equity in access to biomedical
and health services, particularly in rural and marginalized communities across
Mexico, my research and that of others (e.g., Napolitano and Flores 2003) have
shown an intentional resort to various types of medical and health therapies. Why
does it seem that non-biomedical health therapies are burgeoning in the small town
of Autlán, Mexico, where there is a relatively stable level of access to biomedical
health services? The ethnographic research presented in this chapter gives a snap-
shot of the therapeutic landscape in Autlán with regards to non-biomedical
practices.
Conceptual Framework
The ethnographic perspectives that I develop in this chapter build from two impor-
tant areas of anthropological inquiries: (1) medicinal plant knowledge and (2) eth-
nomedical systems. Medicinal plant knowledge has been studied thoroughly by
anthropologists and ethnobiologists as an area of ecological knowledge that is a
fundamental component of human–environment relationships. Anthropologists are
keen to describe biomedicine as just one of many medical systems, noting that all
medical systems are rooted in culture. Not all plant knowledge, and not all health
knowledge, is guarded by specialists; a considerable amount of knowledge is car-
ried around in the heads of laypeople. In this chapter, however, I am particularly
interested in the individuals who are specialists. One of the reasons that I choose
this focus is that the specialists in any cultural group are the most likely to repre-
sent, with greater accuracy, the trends and tendencies for the group (Toledo 2002).
Mexico contains a large diversity of Indigenous groups and ethnomedical sys-
tems. A general categorization, from Kleinman (1980), is between folk, popular,
and professional ethnomedical systems. Much of what is considered traditional
medicine in Mexico would be categorized as part of the folk ethnomedical system.
In Mexico, in particular, it can be challenging to identify different types of ethno-
medical practitioners and distinguish between traditional and alternative healing
modalities, (both non-biomedical) because the body and spirit are considered a
single entity (Press 1982). Press recommends a categorization of (a) traditional
medicine, (b) alternative medicine, and (c) faith healing to distinguish non-biomed-
ical systems. These labels complement the distinctions Kleinman (1980) draws
between folk, popular, and professional ethnomedical systems, presenting a second
challenge of determining what constitutes a professional ethnomedical system.
Homeopathy, chiropractic, and naturopathy are examples of non-biomedical sys-
tems that have over time been established as “professional” systems.
Heinrich and colleagues looked for cultural consensus regarding medicinal plant
knowledge across different cultural areas of Mexico (1998). They found that healers
120 E.A. Olson
As early as the mid-1500s, the Spanish brought their medical traditions with them
to the Americas. The Spanish medical traditions were a blend of Judeo-Christian
beliefs, and Arabic and Greek medicine and practices (Sanchez Mayers 1989).
Curanderismo (folk healing) combines Spanish influences with pre-existing knowl-
edge of herbs and Indigenous beliefs. Curanderos (Indigenous healers) are identi-
fied as such by others in the community, giving them credibility and legitimacy
(Viesca Treviño 2001).
The earliest account of medicinal plants in Mexico is found in the Códice
Matritense de la Real Académica de la Historia, and additional accounts are found
in the Códice Florentino, from the period 1540 to 1585 (Austin 1971) early accounts
of local medicinal plants frequently categorized them as Hierbas Medicinales y
Maderas Portables [en agua] (Medicinal Herbs and [Water] Portable Woods
(Austin 1971)). Hispanic documents were focused on capturing and cataloguing
traditional indigenous knowledge about medicinal plants. The botanical information
Using Plants as Medicines and Health Foods in Southern Jalisco 121
that was recorded included details sufficient to identify the plant and prepare and
administer remedies. The knowledge that had been passed down through oral tradi-
tion was put into writing.
In Heinrich and colleagues’ (1998) study of medicinal plant knowledge in
Mexico, they examined plant usage in different Indigenous groups and demon-
strated that medicinal plants are not selected at random but are culturally perceived
to be effective and therefore usage of the plants is perpetuated. They also suggest
that the use of medicinal plants in the communities they studied persists due to a
widespread lack of biomedical facilities and a general distrust of biomedical physi-
cians and government-sponsored clinics (Heinrich et al. 1998). There are multiple
studies that have likewise shown an increased reliance on traditional, or Indigenous,
medicines in Mexico in recent decades, contradicting the idea that traditional
knowledge gets displaced by biomedicine, (for example, Napolitano and Flores
2003). Traditional medicine and folk healing have been suggested to be practiced
less with increased urbanization and the accompanying processes of acculturation,
especially access to Western education systems (Sanchez Mayers 1989).
The general observation goes like this: malaise caused by supernatural forces
requires a curandero; malaise that results from natural causes requires a physician.
Furthermore, the notion of cost as a barrier to biomedicine has been pervasive. In
fact, physicians have sometimes been portrayed as greedy individuals who are only
seeking profit, a demeaning feature of the profession (Davis-Floyd and St. John
1998; Napolitano and Flores 2003). Curanderos, by contrast, usually don’t charge a
set fee and will accept donations in kind. There is no consensus regarding the impor-
tant role that medicinal plants and non-biomedical practitioners play in contempo-
rary Mexico, particularly since the roles of many of these practitioners are tenuous
and fluid.
Throughout Mexico’s colonial history, there has always been more than one ethno-
medical system. It was in the mid-nineteenth century that the first formally trained
health practitioners arrived in Mexico (Francois-Flores 2009; Sowell 2009). From
1849 to 1893, there were isolated homeopathic practices throughout Mexico. During
this time, under the leadership of President Santa Ana, Spanish physicians from
Cuba brought homeopathic traditions to Mexico. In 1857, the Constitution and the
Restoration of the Republic characterized the political scene of the early homeo-
pathic practices in Mexico. There were significant events such as the first homeo-
pathic drugstore (1867), founding the Mexican Homeopathic Institute (1869), and
official recognition of homeopathy by the Mexican Congress (1879). By the 1890s,
homeopathic medicine was becoming increasingly organized as a clinical practice
(Francois-Flores 2009).
122 E.A. Olson
Overlapping with the revolutionary period in Mexico, between 1893 and 1921,
there was a process of officialization and prosperity for homeopaths in Mexico. In
1895 Porfirio Diaz established the first “National Homeopathic Medical School” by
presidential decree, and in 1900 the first issue of Homeopathy was awarded a medal
and corresponding diploma at the Paris Universal Exposition. The period of growth
and apparent success of homeopathy in Mexico transitioned into an era of multiple
marked conflicts between homeopaths and national leaders and agents up until
around 1940 (Francois-Flores 2009).
In 1943 the Mexican government legally recognized homeopathy, giving legiti-
macy to its physicians and practitioners, but was not very prepared to advance the
teaching of homeopathy in medical schools (Nigenda et al. 2001). At this same
time, the modern Mexican health system was being created and was modeled on the
health system of the USA, emphasizing biomedical practices and excluding other
modalities from the formal health sector. In 1943, both the Ministry of Health and
the Instituto Nacional de Seguro Social (the Mexican National Institute for Social
Security, IMSS) were created with complementary goals. The IMSS was intended
to provide social services like healthcare and retirement programs to organized
labor groups, and the Ministry of Health was intended to direct public health, sanita-
tion, and allocation of resources to the state public health services that delivered
care for uninsured segments of the population (Knaul et al. 2012). Now, however,
these responsibilities have shifted, and a large proportion for rural care is delivered
by the IMSS program Solidaridad (Solidarity).
Moving forward into the 1970s and 1980s, medical pluralism became a recog-
nized descriptor of the health system in Mexico. Mexico’s neoliberal healthcare
reforms began in 1983 as a condition for Mexico to receive loans from the World
Bank and International Monetary Fund, which were needed because of the 1980s
Third World Debt crisis. During the 1980s, both the Ministry of Health and the
IMSS began a series of reforms that directly shaped the national health sector. For
IMSS, the reforms were primarily aimed at fiduciary and administrative matters.
But these changes also implied shifts in the ways that local community members
would interface with biomedicine and seek healthcare.
In 2003, a third reform created the Seguro Popular (Public Insurance), empha-
sized improved access and services for the poor. Although accessibility has
increased, the reforms in Mexico have not resulted in significant reductions of
health inequities, or in increased efficiency, productivity, or quality, despite their
costs (Homedes and Ugalde 2009; Lakin 2009). The federal government in Mexico
has shifted back and forth between centralizing and decentralizing reforms in a way
that has impeded capacity-building within the health sector. The reforms of the last
25 years have injected new money into the healthcare system but do not seem to
have increased quality or efficiency (Homedes and Ugalde 2009).
The result is that half of Mexico’s 100 million citizens are uninsured and more
than half of the country’s annual health spending is out-of-pocket. Mexico has an
unacceptably large uninsured population that receives little preventative healthcare
and faces substantial barriers when seeking curative care (Lakin 2009). In spite of a
Using Plants as Medicines and Health Foods in Southern Jalisco 123
Location
Map 1 Sierra of
Manantlán Biosphere
Reserve located in Jalisco,
and Colima, Mexico
(Olson 2014)
Data Collection
The ethnographic data presented in this chapter are based on interviews and field-
work I conducted during August and December 2013 as part of a larger research
project that I began in June 2013 (and is ongoing at the time of writing). The
larger study is in regard to the transculturation of medicinal plant knowledge. As
of July 2015, I have conducted fieldwork in three primary sites: Autlán, Jalisco,
Mexico; Dornach, Switzerland; Schwäbisch Gmünd and Erlangen, Germany.
Across these three sites, I carried out open-ended life history interviews with
experts in homeopathy, anthroposophy, or other naturopathic or herbal-based
therapeutic medicine.2 I interviewed both researchers and practitioners—types of
knowledge specialists—through purposive and snowball sampling.
In the Autlán region of Mexico, I interviewed Mexican herbalists, homeopaths,
and other types of non-biomedical healers. I also surveyed all types of pharmacies
2
Homeopathy is founded on treating like with like, whereas biomedicine is based on treating like
with unlike (or the opposite). Anthroposophy is principled on using the most natural and rhythmic
means possible to treat malaise, but especially to promote health and prevent illness.
Using Plants as Medicines and Health Foods in Southern Jalisco 125
and apothecaries during these study periods, taking note of features such as
location, type of c lientele, presence of a knowledge expert, variety of therapies and
remedies, physical characteristics of the site, and other observations regarding the
incorporation of medicinal plants in therapeutic practices. The purpose of this sur-
vey was to demonstrate the degree of accessibility of medicinal-plant health prod-
ucts, and to characterize the economic market for these products in the area. I have
also conducted participant observation at community workshops geared toward
teaching the practice of using medicinal plants in Mexico. In this chapter, I present
portions of the data collected in Autlán, Mexico, during two of my research periods
(August and December 2013).
Biographical Vignettes
Daniel was born and raised in Jalisco, and he was very enthusiastic to talk about his
system for healing people. He has 13 diplomas and certificates on his wall. The larg-
est and most central diploma is in iridology. He began by telling me that “Mexicans
are rebels,” and continued to explain that Mexicans “don’t like to conform to any-
thing and don’t trust the system—that’s why so many of them go without vaccinating
their children.” Daniel does not support routine vaccinations, and with regard to
herbalists (hierbateros), Daniel guffawed. He explained that herbalism is the part of
natural curing that he doesn’t want or use. “Using herbs can either accelerate or stop
processes,” he said, and continued to explain that “any intervention is dangerous!”
Daniel spoke about biomedicine as necessary for emergency or trauma medicine
only. He used a vivid hypothetical description of a car accident and “you need your
Using Plants as Medicines and Health Foods in Southern Jalisco 127
insides sewn back together.” He said that indeed we need trauma doctors just like we
need mechanics to fix our cars when they are broken. But health is something else,
he contends, and we need to teach people to retrain our way of thinking about health.
He has seen people cured who could not be helped by biomedicine, and he was
excited to share some videos to convince me how he has cured people who were
considered terminally ill. He showed a number of graphic videos depicting how
people have been treated and cured in his clinic. He was most proud to share a video
of a Catholic clergyman who came to him from abroad to be treated. This particular
patient was considered to be high status, and Daniel considered that status to be
proof of the international acclaim of himself as a healer. There were videos of can-
cer patients, a woman with gangrene, and other patients at Daniel’s facility being
treated. (Most treatments begin with a stay in his clinic where patients are taught the
importance of a clean and pure diet and lifestyle, which they are sent home with
detailed instructions to follow in order to continue the healing.)
Daniel doesn’t believe that God cures people, but rather that it is God who gave
human beings the capacity to know how to cure ourselves. Daniel believes that the
body is designed to cure itself. His treatment philosophy is that what people who are
sick need to do is stop what they are doing (stop their lifestyle), and change. He says
that the treatment is to create an organic change and give the body a good detoxifica-
tion so that it can heal itself. Though some massage and other body manipulation
treatments/therapies are used while patients are at his clinic, there are no herbs or
medicines. Nothing. The clean diet is the medicine. Stinging nettles (ortiga) are
occasionally used but not as a general rule. He also indicates that steam baths
(temascales) are not advised or used often.
Daniel also wanted to talk about “mental” patterns, because he suggests that it is
not just our nutrition that we need to change, but also our way of thinking. From
birth, we are taught and indoctrinated into thinking about health, medicine, and food
in a particular way. He wants to teach people everywhere about his method of
healthcare and that is why he gives conferences/seminars often—in Autlán and
other parts of Jalisco; he also travels to give seminars in Chicago, Illinois and a town
near Tacoma, Washington, on a regular basis. He sometimes offers free workshops
and services to people he thinks are in need. Daniel did not have a distinct moment
when he realized that his worldview was changing. He said that he used to live like
the common person, but then the more he studied and learned, the more he realized
that we need to stop ourselves and let our bodies heal themselves.
Fernanda lives around the corner from the small house where I previously lived
during my research stays for nearly 7 years.3 Fernanda knew me already as a neigh-
bor so she eagerly welcomed me to her clinic (inside her home) for an interview.
3
My previous research focused on Indigenous knowledge in neighboring communities of the
Sierra of Manantlán (Olson 2014) and not in the urban area of Autlán.
128 E.A. Olson
Fernanda grew up in Autlán, and 22 years ago she had nervios. A woman from
Chihuahua came and was working with the local priest who helped organize and
arrange for her to give courses on anatomy. The priest recommended that Fernanda
take the classes, particularly since she had nervios—the priest hoped that Fernanda
would benefit from the classes. During the short workshop series they learned about
human anatomy and the uses of massage and medicinal plants. Fernanda and the
other participants in the community reported being healed and feeling better. The
priest himself started believing more in the massage and chiropractic therapies and
the uses of plant tinctures, and thought it would be good to invest in enhancing the
skills of local community members, so he sent Fernanda and a few others to
Guadalajara to “study it well.”
Fernanda first studied at workshops offered in Autlán, and then went to
Guadalajara. She studied under a teacher from Venezuela, and now hopes to find
an apprentice to whom she can transmit her healing arts. In Guadalajara she stud-
ied hydrotherapies, along with some other natural remedies, including an introduc-
tion to homeopathy. Fernanda notes that she learned only “introductory” or
“simple” homeopathic medicine because trying to really understand all of it, in
depth, would have been “too much and too intensive.” Then she went on to the next
unit of the study, which was chiropractic, and then magnetism, and then uropathy
(uropatía—urine therapy). She learned to use acupressure needles for people who
could not have any alcohol whatsoever, and therefore for whom homeopathic tinc-
tures (which often contain alcohol) are not an option. Fernanda is older now but
continues to practice some for people in the community who seek her out. She
feels strongly about passing on these types of therapeutic knowledge, as she sees it
is important for community members to use natural therapies that are accessible
and not as expensive as biomedicine. She did report a moment in her life when her
worldview changed. She was suffering from the nervios mentioned above, and
found out about natural medicine and then continued studying and traveling to
study. (As Davis-Floyd and St. John (1998) have shown, many holistic medical
practitioners are drawn to explore alternative modalities when they—or someone
close to them—are suffering from a condition that biomedicine cannot cure.)
Natural medicine changed her worldview and was a profession she wouldn’t have
otherwise thought of for herself.
Fernanda explained her opinion on mainstream healthcare and medicinal plants
thusly: with so many people dealing with chronic illnesses (she cited diabetes,
hypertension, and high cholesterol), they start taking many pills to treat their
conditions; at some point they grow tired of taking so many pills and seek out natu-
ral, plant-based, therapies. She creates her own extracts, tinctures, and other medici-
nal remedies in her clinic and uses plants in microdoses. She grows some plants, and
collects others from the mountainside outside of town, or receives some from family
or friends whom she knows have the plant (either in cultivation or in the wild near
their homes).
Using Plants as Medicines and Health Foods in Southern Jalisco 129
Conclusion
Plants are used for health in primarily nutritional ways by both the homeopath and
the iridologist (Debra and Daniel); the practitioner who relies most heavily on plants
for medicinal and curative properties was the natural healer whose training was the
most diverse (Fernanda). The homeopathic practitioner uses homeopathic remedies
that she purchases from a distributor, and creates her own nutritional supplement
that she encourages people to take daily. Meanwhile, Daniel would promote the
usage of nothing but a clean diet, and foods that are local and produced organically.
The interviewees all agree that diet and nutrition are important dimensions of health.
Their professed reliance on plants as medicines is quite varied, however.
Some important themes emerge from my preliminary research in Autlán. The
diversity of non-biomedical practices ranged across homeopathy, herbalism, chiro-
practic, massage, iridology, and other types of expertise in uncategorized medicinal
plants. This diversity is nothing at all like the homogeneity that other researchers
(i.e., Nigenda et al. 2004) predict from the globalization of knowledge and practices,
wherein the dominant biomedical system occludes the local folk ethnomedical sys-
tem. Non-biomedical practitioners in contemporary Mexico adapt homeopathic, and
other, texts and therapies to their local environment and clientele. The practitioners I
interviewed explore various types of non-biomedical healing practices and selec-
tively incorporate them into their therapies—a discovery that resonates with the find-
ings of other researchers (for example, Napolitano and Flores 2003).
The non-biomedical practitioners in Mexico are operating in a biomedically
dominated sociopolitical context. From their work in Mexico City, Nigenda and
colleagues (2004) have come to argue for an increased standardization of so-called
complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapists to facilitate the incorpo-
ration of these therapies into the dominant biomedical system. They are not alone in
taking this perspective; indeed, in the USA we have the similar occurrence wherein
many CAM therapies are professionalized, standardized, and incorporated into the
dominant biomedical system. The experience of lay midwives in Mexico over the
last 20 years has followed this pattern of professionalization (Davis-Floyd 2001).
Referring to Colonial Medicine as medical pluralism, Nigenda and colleagues
(2004) make a vivid comparison with religious syncretism, which transpired con-
currently. But in colonial medicine, as with modern biomedicine, they argue that
traditional medicine is taken up into the dominant (biomedical) system (Nigenda
et al. 2004). My findings do not necessarily support this linear model. If we think
from an emic perspective about what Nigenda and colleagues (2004) term “Colonial
Medicine,” we might see the non-biomedical practitioner from a different perspec-
tive. It is imperative to consider the possibility of resistance to the colonizer;
empowerment demonstrated through a co-optation. Davis-Floyd and St. John (1998)
talk about the commonality of having a transformative personal experience that
precipitates a paradigm shift for those who become alternative health practitioners.
Many of my interviewees indicated such a transformative event, making us wonder
if using non-biomedical therapies is a reaction to (or action against) biomedicine—
rather than an indication of being brought into it.
130 E.A. Olson
Take for example homeopathy in Mexico: my research did not lead to the con-
clusion that homeopathy is in any way subsumed by biomedicine. The homeopathic
physician aptly pointed out that she had attended medical school where she received
the same training as biomedical physicians, but with an added training and certifica-
tion in homeopathy. The additional course of study allows her to have increased
knowledge and training in healing practices. The broader societal interest in home-
opathy might be in part attributed to the awareness that biomedicine is based heavily
on the use of drugs and primarily treats symptoms. Additionally, the history of
legitimization of homeopathy in Mexico, much of which transpired concurrently
with biomedical legitimization, suggests that one is not subsumed by the other.
Globalization is considered to be the rapid dissemination and spread of ideas,
technology, and resources (both material and human) which, some say, trends
toward homogenization. When we talk about ethnomedical knowledge, we are gen-
erally referring to a set of highly ordered and guarded knowledge. The knowledge
of biomedicine is guarded by medical schools; Indigenous knowledge is often
guarded by elders or other identified specialists; homeopathic knowledge is guarded
by homeopathic schools. The knowledge for each system is encoded in written text-
books and/or explicit oral instructions. I suggest that what occurs with the transla-
tion of health knowledge across ethnomedical systems is more complex than
“cultural diffusion,” “cultural borrowing,” or “colonization,” but instead reflects
important factors: (1) embedded ethnomedical histories; (2) predominant health
culture; and (3) individual worldview.
Acknowledgements I wish to express my deep gratitude and appreciation to the many healers
and practitioners of Mexico who have helped facilitate this research, especially to the healers in
Autlan, Jalisco, who are discussed in this report. Portions of this research were carried out with the
support of Andrew W. Mellon Internationalization Grants at Allegheny College. Thank you to
Nicole Dennett for her assistance with the maps in this chapter.
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What If There Is a Cure Somewhere
in the Jungle? States of Emergence
in Medicinal Plant Becomings
Natasha-Kim Ferenczi
Introduction
“Cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, I’ve cured. I’ve cured a doctor, an American,
with Parkinson’s disease.” Don Miguel, exuberant as usual, lists off in Spanish his
successful treatments, each with its own narrative of a person who journeyed, in
some cases from far away, to his small farm. “Look at my Facebook page!” he states
proudly on a hot day in June as we sit in his treatment hut in Talamanca. “I began
treating people when I was ten years old. My first patient was an Afro Caribbean girl,
came here by boat. I learned from my mother. She is Bribri.” At fifty-two he is the
only one out of eight brothers and sisters to learn her healing technique. He does not
speak Bribri or English. Piedras are neatly arranged on his desk, stones of varying
shapes used to diagnose. He demonstrates to me how he places the stone on a par-
ticular punto, a point anywhere on the body. “The brain communicates with the point
and the point communicates with the metal.” The metal tells him about a range of
relationships in the body, the nervous system, right down to the cellular and molecu-
lar level. “There are three thousand puntos on the body from the crown of the head
to the feet. My daughter is eighteen, and she has learned one thousand. Three of my
children are learning. When she is thirty-five she will be a person who knows.”
Don Miguel does not think of himself as a curandero, Awá,1 or shaman. “Soy
científico.” “I’m a scientist,” he declares with a pound to his chest. “I feel the
ground.” He cleans the surface of the soil making up the floor near his desk, care-
fully smoothening a circle. “I feel the temperature. I see if my hand is moist there is
humidity. At 8:00 in the morning I stick my hand out here.” He gestures outside the
back entrance. “I write the temperature. At 12:00 I do the same.” He opens up copy-
books filled with detailed notes on climate change, air temperature changes at dif-
ferent altitudes, and changes in rain patterns. He shows me his collection of water
samples from the river taken over the last few years. “Would you drink this?” he
asks rhetorically. “Plant medicines are affected by all these things.”
Don Miguel responds to my questions about plant medicine with vigorous inver-
sions of meaning. He brags to me about the health professionals (doctors, nurses,
pharmacists) who contact him, North Americans, and Europeans seeking treatment
or information on plant medicines. He responds to my curiosity about why people
“choose him” (and what shapes those trajectories), with a broad smile. “Facebook.”
He furthers that Bribri get treated for free. Personal testimonies of healing experi-
ences fill his Facebook page. Don Miguel tells me that a few Americans suggested
that he raise his rates and adorn a white lab coat. He now charges five hundred dol-
lars for diabetes, and for cancer, one thousand dollars.
During our interviews Don Miguel often rants about how capitalism and egoism
are destroying everything, and how competitive and ruthless many people in
Talamanca are becoming. He throws up his arms helplessly, saying that he cannot
bring me with him to collect medicines because the neighbors will expect payment.
Many medicines grow along well-trodden senderos, or pathways that weave around
people’s yards, and neighbors will assume that I am paying him for a plant walk that
passes through their backyards, entitling them to a cut of his earnings. He heatedly
complains to me about non-Bribri visitors who want to learn about plant medicines,
often for research in health-related fields. “Four women came here to study with
me,” he begins in Spanish. “One German, one Italian, one Tican…” he tapers off.
“They said they had four days. Four days!”
We’re going to study the earth. We’re going to study the soil, what type of soil is here? What
type of insects? So that you can know what kind of plant will be produced. It’s not teaching
‘this plant for this’, ‘that plant for that.’ The whole world wants that type of information.
He digs with his fingers tossing up some soil under his small desk.
1
Awa or Awapa (plural), [translated as médico meaning “doctor” in Spanish], is the title given to
traditional Bribri healers. Awapa are described as important keepers of ancient knowledge and
great sages (Murillo and Segura 2008: 4, in reference to García Segura and Jaén 1996).
What If There Is a Cure Somewhere in the Jungle… 135
You have to start with the soil…there are stages to this specialization. You need to know the
soil, the climate and how it’s changing, the air, the vegetation, the sun, water contamination,
… all this takes years to learn. This is a FIVE THOUSAND YEAR-OLD science. This is
not something you can learn in just a few days! […] They think this plant serves this or that.
No. It doesn’t work that way. Four days!
“They think this plant serves this or that,” he motions two sides with his hands,
“the whole world wants that type of information.” Our many conversations clarify
who is grouped under they and the whole world. He refers to people who visit him
with assumptions about medicine and efficacy that impose a decontextualized, con-
cise, taxonomical approach on his scientific knowledge and on plant identities. In
this research I use the term seekers, people who travel to jungles seeking healers or
hoping to learn about plant medicines.2 What notions of efficacy underpin the idea
of a standardized plant serving a medicinal function, and what epistemological poli-
tics inform his designation of that type of information? I wonder to myself what
kind of narrative he wants to convey to me, the anthropologist, asking about his
practice and about plant medicines. Don Miguel responds to my questions about
plant medicine by decentering plants and emphasizing the biotic environments that
plants interact with, relationships through which medicine emerges. Any knowl-
edge shared about plant medicines must start with the soil and not sever connections
between living things. His emplacement of plant medicine as emerging from a web
of interaction, and not as a thing, is an important conceptual shift to support the
sustainability of the jungle he loves and his practice as a healer.3 My research
focuses on healers’ experiences of decontextualization and reconfigurations of plant
medicine, conceptual shifts often implicit in many methodological approaches.
A priori assumptions about how plant medicine works that regard plant medicine
as a thing that enacts a standard type of healing effect decontextualize plant medi-
cines from their biotic environments. This understanding of efficacy is based on a
conceptual distinction between people, plants, and animals founded on a nature and
society dualism. Mainstream Western perspectives assume medicinal plants to be
bounded, discrete entities, interacting with other entities in only superficial ways.4
This forecloses the possibility that medicine emerges through dynamic relation-
ships, and by extension de-emphasizes the habitats medicinal plants grow in.
Severing medicinal function from growth context is deterritorializing. Ironically
seekers, in their search for alternative treatments and/or knowledge about plant
2
Seekers and healers are not exclusive categories and do not necessarily represent encounters
between different worlds. Seekers can become healers and vice versa.
3
“Plant medicines” refer to all botanical medicines, including tree barks, lianas, and roots,
emplaced in biotic relationships that are always shifting, in dynamic interaction, and in processes
of “becoming” (Deleuze and Guattari 2000). Plant medicinal knowledge and practices are influ-
enced by climate change, changing ecosystems, endangered species, new botanical or animal spe-
cies, and new ways of thinking (Anderson 2011: 2).
4
Tim Ingold writes that the conception of the organism in mainstream theory in biology (evolution-
ary and environmental) is as a “discrete, bounded entity, a ‘living thing’,” one of a group of such
things that relates to other organisms “along lines of external contact”; these things do not shape
one another, and their inner natures remain unaffected by contact (2000: 3).
136 N.-K. Ferenczi
medicine, often uphold the basic axioms upon which allopathic medicine is based.
Analyzing “emergent medicines” (Langwick 2011: 4) and their relationships to
broader economic, political, environmental, and social processes nuances some of
the ways socioecological contexts are affected by the trajectories of seekers, and the
contested conceptual space of people and plant relationships when seekers and heal-
ers meet in efforts to heal.5
I bring out the ways people working with plant medicines negotiate agency
within this conceptual asymmetry around what constitutes plant medicine, and what
is at stake in upholding a plant-centric and standardized perspective of plant medi-
cine. This is done by juxtaposing notions of plant medicines as functioning indepen-
dently of their biotic environments to land struggles in Talamanca, where Bribri,
Cabécar, and Afro Caribbean people must constantly contend with forced displace-
ment, encroachment, deforestation, and industrial agricultural production. Nature’s
increasing abstraction (Büscher 2014) is met with some local efforts in Talamanca
to emplace plant medicine, and constitute medicinal efficacy as contingent on
emplaced plant identities, connected with locales with particular soils and socioeco-
logic relationships. Emplacing or reterritorializing plant medicinal identities as
becoming (Deleuze and Guattari 2000), as dynamic, processual and interactive with
a biotic community, is a vital part of conceptually connecting plant medicine pro-
duction with the conservation of social and physical environments. This involves
contextualizing medicine as a verb, rather than a noun, and shifting plant actors
from the center to the periphery to leave room for other actors (practitioners, soil,
insects, water, and so forth) involved in the coproduction of medicine.
This is a particularly relevant area of research today given the budding popularity
of ethnobotany and plant medicine in the West. I suggest that this interest is part of a
broader desire to shift people and plant relationships, expressed in a variety of ways,
such as food movements promoting organic, non-genetically modified and locally
grown food consumption, as well as in environmental and climate change discourse
encouraging shifts in consumption patterns and awareness of one’s ecological foot-
print. This desire to connect with plants is also suggested by the growth in tourism
around “ethnobotany,” botanical gardens, and the growing popularity of traditional
ceremonies involving plant medicines, such as ayahuasca.6 The need for a paradig-
matic shift in how we relate to other species in nature is nuanced in academic work
that aim to write sentience into nature, and in conferences where plant medicines are
animated, sometimes in very experimental ways, to broaden our imaginations and
help us think through this shift. Focusing on the ways plant medicinal identities are
being constituted and instrumentalized, as subjective beings, actants, causal agents,
5
Healer in this context espouses Osseo-Asare’s description, referring to a variety of health practi-
tioners with training in folk medicine and healing plants, gained through family lineages and
apprenticeships (2014: 13). My research similarly recognizes traditional knowledge and practices
as dynamic, innovative, interactive, and adaptive, with the understanding that localities are linked
with the wider world in countless ways at various levels, and not simply products of the modern
world (Osseo-Asare 2014: 73, in references to Massey 1993).
6
Nolan and Turner (2011) note that in 2008 there were 669,000 Google hits for ethnobotany,
33,000 more than a similar search in March 2005 (134).
What If There Is a Cure Somewhere in the Jungle… 137
7
Kohn (2013) posits that a vital part of finding a way to practice an anthropology that does not
drastically separate humans from nonhumans lies in grasping the relationships between distinctive
forms of representation (9). We partially share “semiotic propensities” that enable multispecies
relations, and analysis (ibid.). He furthers that improving the ways we attend to our relationships
with nonhuman life forms demands that we “make ontological claims—claims about the nature of
reality” (ibid.).
8
Hugo De Burgos (2014) analyzes contemporary transformations of indigenous medicine in
Nicaragua, and discusses how in the past two decades several indigenous leaders in Nicaragua
have sought to instrumentalize traditional medicine as a political tool for signaling and asserting
cultural boundaries and revitalizing ethnic identity (399). De Burgos analyzes circumstances under
which medical understandings and practices become political tools, and markers of cultural resis-
tance and cultural identity (ibid.).
9
I refer to traditional knowledge instead of indigenous knowledge to include Afro Caribbean
knowledge of bush medicine in my designation. Afro Caribbean and indigenous communities face
similar challenges relating to land rights, agrochemical pollution, discrimination, and poverty.
138 N.-K. Ferenczi
abstract ways of perceiving nature, and what Büscher (2014) terms “liquid
nature.”10
Deviating from research on a particular ethnic group of people, this itinerant
research takes only a superficial approach to ethnographic description of “a people,”
to highlight instead a conceptual space and its implications.11 Strategies for
contextualizing “culture” have expanded to include the process of knowledge pro-
duction itself (Hastrup and Hervik 1994: 2), bringing forth distinct “thematicities”
in comprehensive, intersubjective studies of practices and motivations (Hastrup and
Hervik 1994: 6–7). The pathways taken in therapeutic questing form a meshwork
(Ingold 2007), a term that encapsulates the innovations generated along entangled
threads and pathways that connect seekers and healers, as opposed to connected
nodes of a network (Ingold 2007, 2011). Much recent ethnographic work focuses on
dynamic processes of knowledge production and meaning making practices and
experiences that encompass emotions, inner worlds, motives, values, continuities,
discontinuities, reformulations, generative capacities, ambiguities, and paradoxes
(Adams 2001; Harvey 2011; Irving 2007, 2010; Langwick 2011; Lester 2005; Parke
1995; Tsing 1993). These frameworks do not simply focus on individual experience
they bring out diversity within structures that extend beyond the individual, explor-
ing individual practices that are interwoven into broader processes and knowledge
practices. I could have focused on any number of places where seekers from
advanced neoliberal societies meet with healers in biodiversity “hot spots” of the
global south.12 This research looks at threads connecting British Columbia (B.C.),
Canada, and Talamanca, Costa Rica.
It is through juxtaposition of a variety of narratives articulated by healers, seek-
ers, and participants who are aggregated around the cottage industry production of
plant medicine that I hope to politicize the organization of knowledge into catego-
ries that sever relationships between them. The narratives selected aim to highlight
the negotiated space of legitimacy in healing practices in Talamanca, and efforts to
emplace medicine in reaction to the increasing abstraction and decontextualization
of plant medicines. Narratives of seeking and healing include the practices of a few
women and men who work with plant medicine in Costa Rica, with particular
10
Büscher defines “liquid nature” as “nature made fit to circulate in capitalist commodity markets”
(2014: 185).
11
This relates to Ingold’s critique of descriptive accuracy in ethnography versus the open-ended
character of engagement in the arts. Ingold (2013: 6) refers to the “way of the craftsman,” an “art
of inquiry” whereby knowledge grows from practical and observational engagements with life
forms and things (in reference to Dormer 1994; Adamson 2007).
12
I refer to Costa Rica as a biodiversity “hot spot” because Costa Rica’s ecology has drawn the
attention of European and North American researchers since the mid-nineteenth century (Blum
2008: 37, in reference to Janzen 1983), and the country has a long history of using ecotourism as
a tool for conservation, and social as well as economic benefit (Seales and Stein 2012: 20). Since
the 1970s and 1980s the national park system has supported a highly successful ecotourism indus-
try that in 1994 became the country’s biggest source of foreign capital, making both education and
environment very politicized areas of economic and national life in the country (Blum 2008:
36–7).
What If There Is a Cure Somewhere in the Jungle… 139
13
Tsing (1993) looks at marginality as a source of both constraint and creativity, and focuses on the
space created by this tension, and on the creative ways that individuals interact with and within
structures. Social actors have influence within circumstances of domination (Williams 1977;
Ortner 2006) and it is important to recognize that adapting medicines to Western notions of legiti-
macy occurs alongside innovative practices in the marketing of medicines.
14
Talamanca has the largest indigenous population in the country, the majority of whom are Bribri,
and to a lesser extent Cabécar.
15
Participants included an Anishinaabe shaman, a woman from British Columbia who conducts
ayahuasca ceremonies, a man apprenticing with a West African Shaman in Costa Rica, and several
herbalists and Naturopaths. These conversations took place primarily in homes, and also in apoth-
ecaries, on herb walks, and over the phone and Internet.
140 N.-K. Ferenczi
them in new ways.16 Participation provided clarity around the theme of seeking, and
seekers’ motivations for traveling and investing time and money to shape their per-
sonal relationships with plants. All participants are referred to by pseudonyms in this
chapter, and I have underlined or capitalized words uttered with emphasis in partici-
pants’ narratives. All translations from Spanish to English are done by the author,
with English translations in square brackets.
In Talamanca I espoused a walking methodology, making the subjects of conversa-
tions, the plants, literally in presence and allowing for the interanimation between
places, my interlocutors (people, plants, trees), and myself. Interviews were carried
out on medicinal plant hikes and tours, in homes and clinics, often while planting,
harvesting, and processing, as well as in more formal settings such as the CATIE gar-
dens, the National Biodiversity Institute (InBio), and the University of Costa Rica.17
Discussing plant medicine in context is of importance socially, culturally, and politi-
cally, particularly given the rapid deforestation occurring in Costa Rica. Corresponding
to Ingold’s “dwelling perspective” this involves situating the practitioner in active
interaction with their surroundings (2000: 5). In order to dwell an attunement to the
senses and the sensory dimensions of life worlds is essential, such as meanings associ-
ated with landscapes (Basso 1996; Peña 2011), soundscapes (Feld 1991, 1996),
smellscapes (Classen et al. 1994), and haptic sensation (Kuriyama 1999). During
medicinal plant walks certain plants, lianas, insects, and anthills trigger memories
leading participants to share narratives about harvesting practices, medicinal uses, and
stories of illness and healing. Participants would instruct me to smell this, taste that,
or hold a piece of bark in my mouth to keep the plant, as actor, present on different
sensual levels.18 Holding interviews in context also shed light on plant collection and
processing protocols and the co-construction of knowledge as participants collec-
tively remember teachings and reminisce on the uses of this vine or that anthill soil.
Don Miguel insisted that treatment contextualize our interactions and inter-
views. Smelling, holding, and embodying medicine under his care were condi-
tional to learning about his practice, an embodied, phenomenological approach
becoming a vital component of participation. It was alongside the treatment of my
condition, dirty blood, for several months that he described to me his practice and
his experience as a healer and a scientist in a global capitalist context. During our
16
Several individuals from Vancouver and roughly ten Americans from all over the United States
attended the course, which focused on deepening awareness of people and plant relationships,
genealogically (by tracing ancestral connections), and socially (by finding plant allies and com-
municating with plants in a variety of ways and on different levels, such as dreaming with a par-
ticular plant under your pillow). At conferences and public events ethnobotany intensive courses
are publicized, as well as “meditation retreats” and ceremonies (in effect strongly linked to culti-
vating people’s relationships with ayahuasca).
17
Semi-structured interviews with local academics and forest specialists working with the Bribri,
Cabécar and Afro Caribbean people enlarged my perspective on institutional and academic col-
laborations with locals to stimulate forest production in these communities.
18
Research also involved spending time in people’s kitchens and talking while peeling mangoes or
doing garden work, volunteering at a Bribri soup kitchen, preparing for market day by processing
medicine and cacao, packaging, loading trucks, going to markets, and interacting regularly with
vendors selling plant medicines.
What If There Is a Cure Somewhere in the Jungle… 141
many interviews in his little consultation hut on his farm, “observant participation”
(Tedlock 1991) involved shifting subject and object. My embodied participation,
and the critical reflexivity and understanding it lead to, sensitized me to the impor-
tance of a relationship-based model for conceptualizing plant medicine, one that
recognizes soil, insects, stones, and water sources as among the actors participat-
ing in plant becoming medicine, and that acknowledges the way fruit and other
foods become medicine in certain contexts and with certain preparations.19
I will take a moment to briefly discuss the unfolding of my research, which
clarifies some connections I am drawing between seeking and states of emergence
of medicinal plants. In 2010, I travelled to Costa Rica to conduct pilot research on
healers’ practices and the relationships between seeking and healing. I spent a cou-
ple of months learning about tropical medicinal botany and permaculture while vol-
unteering on a farm owned by an American Naturopath who began a healing practice
in Costa Rica a few decades ago. Luke’s decision to relocate related to a traumatic
experience that he had during a student protest against the Vietnam War in the
United States. This healing trajectory, though very personal, can be connected with
a period of density in North American seeking in Latin America in the 1960s, a
preceding wave of seekers (mostly hippies at that time) going to the jungle to con-
nect with plants in new ways.
It was on Luke’s farm that I first heard of Don Isidro on the radio. He was being
interviewed about his “cure” for cancer and his work with plant medicines. He
expressed his desire to sell his cure to the Costa Rican government, not wanting the
recipe, a rumored twelve plants, to be stolen by a pharmaceutical company. Don
Isidro tells me that he learned how to make the medicine from the indigenous peo-
ple in the mountains of Costa Rica. He went seeking therapeutic alternatives when
his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. Once she was cured, Don Isidro shifted
from being a seeker to becoming a healer, his clinic an outcome of his healing jour-
ney. Standing in line with number 108, it was several hours before Don Isidro came
to greet me. When he did, he thrust a business card in my face. Responding to my
blank look, he states triumphantly, “un doctor, oncólogo de los Estados Unidos!” [A
doctor, an oncologist from the United States.] He expectantly waits for a sign of
approval from me that acknowledges that this is important! “An American doctor
gets treatment from me! That is how good I am” is the subtext of the prominently
displayed piece of cardboard. He gestures to his wall of fame featuring framed
magazine and newspaper articles about his cure for cancer and HIV, and the testi-
monies of those he has cured, a performance he projects to the people crowding the
waiting room, reminding them of his popularity, a fame that extends across interna-
tional borders. The queue stretches for a block, peopled by the local marginalized
poor, Ticans, Afro Caribbean people and, evidently, American health practitioners.
19
Termed elsewhere as “knowing from the inside” (Ingold 2013). Peña (2011) uses the term
Co-performative witnessing, whereby embodied action functions as both object and method of
study, recognizing the ethnographer and research participants as interlocutors encompassing sen-
sual communication (3).
142 N.-K. Ferenczi
The current wave of seekers arguably encompasses a much more diverse group of
actors than movements in the 1960s.
In 2012–2013 I began field research in B.C. and later returned to Costa Rica to
carry out ethnographic research in Talamanca as part of my doctoral research on
seekers and healers, under the auspices of the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council. My point of departure a variety of public academic discussions
in Vancouver on spirit plant medicine that aim to shift perceptions, regulations and
practices around particular plant medicines in Canada, and provide people with
opportunities to participate in ethnobotany workshops, courses, plant walks, and
ayahuasca ceremonies in Vancouver, Hawai’i, and Peru. My attention during these
talks was drawn to the ways plant identities and spirits were being configured and
enlivened, formulations that also involved their decontextualization from their
living contexts. The presentations explored the possibilities of upholding multiple
species’ perspectives, in particular a plant-centric perspective whereby plants are
the protagonists charting the course of the future of the Earth, using their intelli-
gence and survival strategies to move their seeds around with the help of wind pat-
terns, humans, birds, animals, and insects. Ayahuasca was presented as a kind of
plant spirit celebrity, an ontogenesis fêted as an agenda to expand human conscious-
ness and restore balance in the world by shifting us into a new paradigm for thinking
about people and plant relationships. Ironically discussions on ayahuasca’s agenda
were framed within a post-positivist recognition of nature as sentient and plants as
having spirits and intentions, yet the notion of a plant having an “agenda” to expand
to the West is a slippery anthropomorphism; caricaturing ayahuasca as an inten-
tional global messenger also justifies the decontextualization and increased harvest-
ing of the plants and vine used to make the brew, all justified because ayahuasca
wants to proliferate transnationally. These discussions center on medical applica-
tions in Canadian health contexts and efficacy, arguments sustained by the testimo-
nials of recovered addicts.
Seekers might also be driven by less serious illnesses, curiosity, an interest in learning more
20
around healing. The question narrowly circumscribes the way it can be answered, a
response that effaces context as a variable influencing efficacy and function. Emergent
therapeutic practices and contexts, and the way they interact with public health dis-
course and Western allopathic understandings have been examined elsewhere
(Langwick 2001, 2011; Pigg 1992, 1995). Theorists have analyzed the way plant
medicines and articulations of the body are negotiated around cultural constructions
of “efficacy” (Craig 2012), different therapy models for mental disability (Hernández-
Wolfe 2011), different classificatory schemes (Kleinman 2010), different “emplot-
ment” practices (Mattingly 2010), different notions of “science” and “modern
medicine” (Adams 2001; Berkes 2008; Harvey 2011; Langwick 2011), distinctions
between “medicines” and “narcotics” (Viladrich 2007), affordability and availability
(Vandebroek et al. 2007), transnational movements (Ceuterick et al. 2007; Ososki
et al. 2007; Pettigrew and Tamu 2002), and political and economic shifts (Gaur and
Patnaik 2011; Snodgrass et al. 2008; Zhang 2007). Million (2013) examines the colo-
nial processes entrenched in the biopolitics that have emerged in bureaucratic proto-
cols and the way pathologizing discourse around indigenous trauma is used to detract
from questions of self-determination in Canada.21 Various theorists also address intel-
lectual property rights and benefit sharing in the commoditization of plant medicine
(Hayden 2003, 2005, 2007; Posey 1996; Yamin and Posey 1993), as well as some of
the impacts pharmaceutical bioprospecting has on healers and the desacralization of
nature (Islam 2010; Posey 2002).22
A smaller body of research looks at the implications of how efficacy is deter-
mined and what it means to assert that a medicine “works” (Craig 2012; Langwick
2011).23 Craig (2012) juxtaposes biomedical understandings of efficacy to sociocul-
tural understandings, the former evaluated through measurement in controlled clini-
cal contexts, the latter as the ability to produce desired outcomes (4). What makes a
medicine efficacious, and how such claims are made, who makes them and why,
hinge on the “varied social ecologies” within which treatments are developed and
evaluated, patients are treated and professionals are trained (ibid.). This points to the
21
Dian Million points out the way indigenous “self-determination” is so interpolated in state-
imposed biopolitical programs for emotional and psychological care grounded in a carefully con-
structed “trauma,” a strategy of channeling attention away from self-determination and land rights
in Canada (2013: 6, 12).
22
The term biodiversity prospecting refers to the pursuit of biotechnological, pharmaceutical, and
agricultural industries for biochemical and genetic resources that have commercial value, to
develop new products (Posey 1996: 9). Michael Balick (1996) identifies the agreement between
Costa Rica’s National Biodiversity Institute (InBio), a nonprofit organization, and pharmaceutical
giant Merck, Sharp, and Dohme, as an exemplary model for future policy-making, an agreement
negotiated with conservation requirements and policies for sustainable production, with profits
said to go towards developing conservation infrastructure. Posey (1996) argues that the indigenous
groups in the areas where plant samples were extracted were not consulted, nor benefitted.
23
Langwick (2011) alludes to a Tanzanian artist’s cartoon drawing of a “mganga” selling medicine
to a Western client. The artist depicts the client’s concern over whether “it is true” that the medi-
cine works, revealing his perception of what the client means by it, based on his imagination of
formal education and science, the World Health Organization, and pharmaceutical bioprospecting
(13).
144 N.-K. Ferenczi
need to address the “issue of efficacy” in much broader terms than clinical trials and
notions on “what works” (Craig 2012: 4).
The theoretical underpinnings of allopathic medicine are perhaps being called
into question, but within this theoretical chaos there is a pattern in approaches to
“natural” medicine of upholding a strong nature and society dualism, expressed in
ideas on how medicine should look, taste, and its general discrete character. This
concept of plant medicine can be linked with the marketing of “natural medicine”
that produces an affect of bringing the body into balance with nature and sometimes
with an environmental ethic, obscuring how “unnatural” the processing and market-
ing of medicinal plants can be. The herbal industry benefits from these “affective
attitudes” (Ngai 2005: 4) exploiting the emotional spaces of “natural healing” and
preventative healthcare, in a social context whereby therapeutic optimization is a
preoccupation of many. What appears to be in opposition to the authority of allo-
pathic medicine and the “unnatural” is, from a Foucauldian standpoint, often a
“superficial reshuffling of terms or allegiances at the level of content” that upholds
the “deeper axioms of knowledge” on which subordination is founded (Knauft
2002: 142). The “anthropocentric disconnectedness” from nature (Fox 1996: 43)
that the premise of natural healing seeks to challenge becomes reinstated for those
wealthy enough to shop in the world of holistic healing.24
The popularity of ethnobotany and therapeutic seeking are increasing flows of
people to places known for their biodiversity. Healers and seekers connect easily
online and these interactions bring together a range of actors across transnational
spaces: healers, patients, health professionals, bioprospectors, academics, appren-
tices, and cottage industry producers of plant medicines. Don Miguel continually
refers me to his Facebook page to follow up on the cases he refers to during our
interviews, highlighting his client base from North America. His page is active and
dense with personal testimonies and expressions of gratitude. They reflect that
although the trajectories followed to places of healing are deeply personal, they are
also connected to social networks and are often heard about through word of mouth,
media, and the Internet.25
A participant in this research from B.C. tells me about how he randomly did a
“Google” search to map out his healing trajectory. Responding to my question,
“why Costa Rica?” he replied,
24
The burgeoning herbal industry has generated much interest in countries with rich biodiversity.
Hayden (2003) points out that after roughly half a century of pharmaceutical companies showing
relative disinterest in plant remedies due to the prioritizing of synthetic chemistry, the “hype”
around the drug industry’s “return to nature” in the late 1980s reflected a renewed interest in nature
in the USA and Europe, a fast track for finding new medicinal innovations (359). During this
period several well-publicized bioprospecting arrangements took place, whereby multinational
companies partnered with indigenous organizations and young research institutes in biodiversity
rich areas (ibid.).
25
Basso (1996) points out that while the self-conscious experience of place might be fundamen-
tally a private experience, tangible representations of places are often publically consumed, and
places are sensed together (57).
What If There Is a Cure Somewhere in the Jungle… 145
Originally? Being [pause] like…addicted… I heard of this iboga stuff, a buddy of mine at
the pub told me about it, and uh I said, “Oh my god, that sounds amazing!” Plant medicine,
and it houses people with addictions, and it’s fast and it’s really and it’s really… I don’t
have to go through this clinical white suited sort of stuff? I don’t believe them anyway…
So I went home and was like [clicks away at an invisible keyboard] and it’s like whoa! For
me it was easy [choosing to go to Costa Rica]. Once I saw different things come up… I
actually tried to call Iboga therapy house [in Canada] but they were very nonresponsive,
seemed like, untogether, didn’t get back to me, whatever… it was expensive, five thousand
dollars whoa. I was like, as if I’m not going to go to this guy, it just made total sense, he’s
a tenth generation shaman from Africa […]
Paul began the interview by sharing with me his trepidation around the decontex-
tualization of iboga (Tabernanthe iboga) in ibogaine treatments, and the way iboga
is being integrated into North American healing contexts. Our interview began with
him reading a text off his cell phone requesting that he give an online testimonial of
his healing experience. As he read it, he seemed to be trying to reconcile his mixed
emotions; on the one hand he wanted to provide a testimonial and testify to the
profound healing of iboga, and on the other hand he felt tentative about doing so
because of the way the alkaloid ibogaine (an extraction of iboga) has come to rep-
resent iboga, and the widespread misconceptions generated by current exaggerated
and oversimplified claims in North America about ibogaine’s ability to cure heroin
addiction in a single dose.
They need a way for it to become integrated into the system so, they love, medical world
loves, like, you know, how can we measure this? No one’s died on this side of it; people
have died on that side of it [ibogaine clinics]. They treat differently. They don’t treat by the
spirit they treat by body weight, [pause] which is a total different thing.
Paul balanced his critique of the ibogaine clinical approach with an acknowledg-
ment of the political circumstances that force the “medicalization” of iboga, considered
a class one illegal drug in North America. The presence of a medical practitioner, a
physical examination, and health forms to be completed in advance distinguish prac-
tices and ceremonies around ayahuasca and ibogaine in North America, adjusted to
political, economic, legal, and cultural circumstances. Ceremonies are also modified to
make them more relevant to a North American clientele, including talk therapy to help
contextualize experiences.26
Decontextualization is an implicit part of the industrial production of plant medi-
cine, notwithstanding scientists and businessmen in Costa Rica who are trying to
pioneer new models for marketing sustainably produced strong plant medicines that
grow in soils with unique compositions. A Costa Rican ethnobotanist Félix stated
that countries that export the cheapest raw materials are those typically selected in
commercial agreements (and to a lesser extent the exotic associations consumers
make with particular countries). When he tried to market his Hombre Grande
(Quassia Amara) to a herbal company that was importing it from elsewhere, they
were indifferent to his findings that revealed that his had a higher alkaloid content,
Other reformulations include linguistic adaptations to the sacred songs (icaros) of shamans, in
26
because of the soil it grows in. Similarly, Eugénio, a researcher on forest manage-
ment, described to me how he tried to negotiate an agreement to export Quassia
Amara to a German company. He proposed supplying it for them by means of a
sustainable model for production that involved indigenous communities, offering
the company the opportunity to market Quassia that is sustainably produced by
Bribri and Cabécar people on Talamancan soil. The company responded that they
were only interested in the raw material. Any increase in price would result in their
procurement of the raw material from somewhere else.
The forests in Latin America are disappearing because people don’t value them. People and
society blames logging, but it’s not that. That’s a lie. Latin America needs to value every-
thing that is in the forest, timber, medicines, food, and transform these into benefits for the
people who live in the forest. Because if people don’t perceive its benefits they will elimi-
nate the forest to have agriculture. My strategy of conservation is such that the forest is a
productive system.
Soil and Becoming
The Bribri consider Talamanca their original homeland and each indigenous clan
carries a name that identifies them as the guardian of a particular animal, plant, loca-
tion, or quality (Palmer et al. 1991: 16).27 The Bribri understand their history to be
the history of all indigenous people in North America and Latin America; all indig-
enous people’s origins are traced to corn seeds brought by Sibö from SuLa’káská,
which translates to “The Place of Destiny” (Palmer et al. 1991: 31).28 The names
that Sibö gave to the different seeds are those identifying the different clans (ibid).
White people come from a different source: the King of Leaf-cutter Ants, working
together clearing the land around their nests and destroying all the vegetation in
their path (Palmer et al. 1991: 36).
27
According to Maria Bozzoli’s interpretation of Bribri/Cabécar oral history and cosmology, all
things found on Earth have supernatural “owners,” or “guardians” referred to as “wak” (Palmer
et al. 1991: 15). It is difficult to translate wak as there is no English word that really encompasses
its meaning.
28
The multiple colors of corn he brought, black, purple, yellow, and white, account for the variety
of skin colors and tones (Palmer et al. 1991: 31). The seeds were transported to this world at night,
which is why indigenous people are born at night, and why the awapa chant and conduct curing
ceremonies at night (ibid.).
What If There Is a Cure Somewhere in the Jungle… 147
Where the leaf-cutter ants live, all the vegetation is gone because they cut every last leaf and
take them back to their big nests. That’s how the white man is. He works very hard, but he
destroys Nature. He chops down all the trees to make big cities, and where he lives all the
vegetation is gone (ibid.).
To create soil and make it fertile, Sibö used the flesh and blood of the tapir.29
During the time period before indigenous people existed, Sibö had created the sky
and Earth, but the Earth was only comprised of rock. Sibö wanted to plant corn
seeds and needed soil to germinate them (Palmer et al. 1991: 33). A portion of the
story of the creation of Earth goes as follows.30
In a very distant place, on another planet, there lived a tapir family. They were a grand-
mother, a son, two daughters and a little granddaughter. Sibö asked a bat to fly to that place
and suck the blood of the little girl-tapir, because he wanted to make an experiment. The bat
did as he was beckoned, and when he returned to this world he defecated on the rocks. A
few days later the first trees, tsinu, kita’, klà and kapék, began to sprout from that place.
These trees have a red sap that looks like blood, because they grew from the blood of the
little girl-tapir.
Sibö realized that his experiment to make soil was working, so he sent the bat a second
time to suck the blood of the little girl-tapir. The bat returned and defecated again on the
rocks, and more trees grew.
Now Sibö knew how he could make soil. He sent the bat back a third time, but this time
someone was waiting for him. It was the King of Pita, who was there to protect the little
girl-tapir. Pita is the plant from which we take the fibers to make thread. The King of Pita
transformed himself into a fine white thread that stretched across the door of the place
where the little girl-tapir was sleeping. […]
The story continues with the bat getting cut by the thread, and Sibö looking for
someone else to continue his work, eventually himself going in person to speak with
the girl’s mother, and inviting them to a party so that the little girl can be cured and
stand on her own (the girl could not walk because she weighed too much). The
mother refuses, saying the girl is too heavy to carry, and that only her grandmother
can lift her. Sibö promised to return with presents and persuaded the mother, and
after much begging, eventually convinced the hesitant grandmother, who suspected
trickery.
[…] When they arrived on the earth and got to the party, Sibö called the mother of the little
girl-tapir, tátaLa, and he said,
“Cousin, come make chocolaté for us to drink.”
When the dancing started, Sibö invited the grandmother tapir to dance, but the grand-
mother said,
“No I can’t dance. The little girl weighs too much.”
But Sibö told her that she must dance for the little girl to get well, and he offered her a
strap of mastate so she could tie the child on her back.
The dance began, with people forming a great circle. They danced and danced, one, two,
three, four rounds, and taz! The mastate straps burst and the little girl-tapir fell to the
29
The tapir is a very respected animal to the Bribri. The tapir’s sacrifice is acknowledged in food
taboos, and many indigenous people today do not consume its flesh, and if they do, it is done with
great respect according to protocols established in the laws Sibö bestowed upon the people (Palmer
et al. 1991: 32–3).
30
As narrated by Juan Vargas (in Palmer et al. 1991: 33–4).
148 N.-K. Ferenczi
ground, and hundreds of feet trampled her. The body of the little girl was mashed over the
rocky earth. And that is how Sibö made the soil from the flesh and blood of the tapir. Now
Sibö could plant his corn seeds. That is how he made the earth fertile for the people.
The celebration of the origin of Earth is a feast involving death, whereby reci-
procity is an important theme (Bozzoli de Wille 1975: 7). Bozzoli advances an
interpretation of the story as one of “transition from nature to culture” symbolized
through blood: a bat sucked the tapir’s blood and defecated Bixa orellana L., a plant
that represents blood in healing rituals, and the chocolaté served at the event is a
beverage that symbolizes blood (ibid.). The story marks a transition from “raw
blood (earth),” to “digested blood” (plants emerging from the bat’s feces), to
“cooked blood” (the chocolaté shared at the feast) (ibid.). Death animates nature;
once the tapir was killed, people, plants, and animals could sprout (ibid.).
All that one sees in this world are images from the other world, thus what one
sees as an animal in this world could be a fruit or vegetable in the other world. In the
language spoken during rituals, certain names of these fruits and vegetables are used
to refer to mythical beings and certain animals (Murillo and Segura 2008: 23).
During death rites those who bury the dead, óköm (pl. óköpa), meaning “one who
handles ó” (translated as axe or as blood), handle axes, a symbol that people are
trees and the dead are dead trees (Bozzoli de Wille 1975: 5).31 The complexity of
relationships connecting all beings—mythical beings, human beings, animals,
insects, birds, plants, trees, rocks, and bodies of water—reflects the incommensura-
bility of describing people, plants, and animals as discrete categories, or even think-
ing of them as “beings” rather than “becomings.” People are trees and are also
characterized as food; clans are seeds.
“This is our supermarket and our pharmacy,” Anna, a Cabécar woman, gestures
to the trees and lianas surrounding us. “Culture,” she tells me, is “algo que es vital”
[something that is “full of life.”] Culture is embodied in daily actions. With one
swift machete blow, “crack!” the cacao pod’s white fleshy placenta is exposed. She
points to a separate patch of cacao trees, grafted to cope with the monilia fungus
attacking them.32 “Estos son injertado.” [“These are grafted”]. She pauses to let the
full weight of her statement take effect. “For us,” she continues, “all life comes from
a seed. So, we are just trying this technique in this small section.” Uncertainty writ-
ten across her face is accompanied by a shrug. One must adapt to current circum-
stances. Sometimes survival involves practices that uphold multiple incommensurable
ontologies, and grafting trees is an example of this. Cacao is a particularly challeng-
ing actor to yield to such ontogenesis. “Sibö, Tierra Madre [Mother Earth].” “This
is our identity,” states the Bribri director of the women’s group, holding up a cup of
chocolaté processed and brewed from their cacao trees and prepared as I sat down
to our interview. “We are a matrilineal clan, women maintain the culture, and
31
For an elaborate explanation, see Maria Bozzoli’s dissertation (1975). Óköpa are also considered
as specialists in handling axes, because they build structures for placing the dead, and the roofs of
the sepulchers (Bozzoli de Wille 1975: 5).
32
Participants in this research, in particular Afro Caribbean people, declare that monilia was inten-
tionally introduced to cripple the thriving Afro Caribbean cacao businesses.
What If There Is a Cure Somewhere in the Jungle… 149
women are the dueñas [guardians] of the land and animals. Only a woman can make
chocolaté,” she states, expressing a concern for a future without anyone apprentic-
ing to become a master of cacao ceremonies. It is a five-year apprenticeship to
become Tsuru’oköm, a formation only available to certain clans.33 Cacao produc-
tion is one of several projects designed by Bribri and Cabécar women in collabora-
tion with local institutions, to develop indigenous women’s economic participation,
and strengthen cultural identity and traditional practices.
Several participants expressed similar concerns around the challenges to long-
term apprenticeships needed to carry forward cultural traditions and for healing. To
become awá takes over a decade and is only available to particular clans. Lana
explains that Maestro de ceremonias is a more appropriate designation for the
awapa working today. “Are there still awapa?” I ask as we sit at her kitchen table,
cats scurrying in and out of the doorway.
Not real awá. Awá begin learning at eight years old, can’t be more than fifteen. They can’t
have an intimate relationship, you need to be fully immersed in the tradition. Now the
youths are interested in dating, cell phones, they don’t want to make those sacrifices. Awá
here start learning in their forties, so they aren’t really awá, they started too late. They are
maestros, Bikákla, they conduct ceremonies (funerals, births) and organize parties, but they
don’t know the songs. They can’t hear the piedritas speak.
An awá cures via special songs tailored to distinct ailments, which are passed on
by Sibö, and also uses medicinal plants and lianas (bejucos), sacred curing stones
called Siã or Siõ, balsa wood (Ochroma Pyramidale), and animal skins and bones
(Murillo and Segura 2008: 4).34 The awá’s song is envisioned as a bird that travels
to converse with the spirit of the illness (ibid.). The Sĩõ’tãmĩ are responsible for tak-
ing care of the curing stones or piedras, which are kept in a small bag (Murillo and
Segura 2008: 6). Lana tells me how her uncle had several piedritas, fondly referring
to the little piedras. She describes how he would put stinging nettle in front of his
bag in the house, to keep them from wandering off. There are very few clan mem-
bers left, but the clan continues to guard the piedritas Siã in Káspaspa, in a cotton
bag enclosed in a basket, to prevent them from escaping and transforming them-
selves into entities deadly to humans, including a jaguar, a hawk messenger bring-
ing plagues, or a water tiger (ibid.).
33
The women formed a group after coming together in response to a massive earthquake in the
early 1990s that left many isolated villages in need of emergency supplies, orchestrating provisions
for many communities on the reserve. Their leadership at this time of crisis was so successful in
uniting communities that they continue to go to different villages to help women and families,
encourage cultural practices, and address climate change concerns. Several indigenous women’s
groups have formed associations to support and affirm women’s participation economically,
socially, and politically in their communities, by getting involved in business and production
(Dubois 2002: 11).
34
An awá has an acute knowledge of the manifestations of the dueños (owners or guardians) of
each illness, and the skills necessary to return them to their places of origin, below where the sun
rises (Murillo and Segura 2008: 4). A song can last two, four, or eight nights, depending on the
gravity of the illness, but most often takes place over four nights (ibid.). Any mistakes can have
lethal consequences.
150 N.-K. Ferenczi
Lana explains that the songs must be sung with perfection and the awá must be
able to hear the piedritas’ messages. The notion of authenticity she attaches to her
designation of real awá relates to a level of sentience that can only be learned early
on in life over many years. Several of her deceased family members were awapa.
During our interviews she spoke of Bribri youths not interested in apprenticing to
become an awá. She also shared the struggles she faces fighting encroachment and
pollution from agrochemicals that are used on banana plantations and contaminating
nearby land and water. Maintaining contexts for traditional apprenticeships is further
challenged by pressures to find work off the reserve. “Un mundo vacío,” [an empty
world], she holds an empty vase upside down. Her eyes water over. The difficulties
in maintaining long-term apprenticeships connect to economic pressures, social
changes, environmental changes, and shifting perceptions of medicine and healing.
‘Our knowledge needs to be transmitted how they are, not summarized,’ [“no resumido”].
“Si es resumido no va a entender.” [If our knowledge is summarized, they won’t under-
stand.] ‘It can’t be invented things, our knowledge must be taught by a teacher who respects
how things are.’
Lana’s words hang in the air. How might “invented things” correspond to the
categories imposed on knowledge that distort and decontextualize in efforts to carry
information forward? “No resumido” implores people who are interested in learn-
ing or documenting Bribri knowledge to formulate methodologies and pedagogies
that do not divide up socionatures into disconnected parts, but instead hold open
space for the fields of relationships connecting all beings in this realm and those
beyond. In other words, a methodology that goes “beyond the human” (Kohn
2013).35 The quest for information about plant medicine and infrastructural devel-
opment around plant medicine (academic research centered on building plant inven-
tories, Red lists, herbal industrial production) tend to operate on an idea of a
standardized, static valuation of plant medicine, which starkly contrasts perceptions
of plant medicine as constituted in relationship with a biotic community, one that
includes beings from other realms.
While journeying in the old school buses transporting mainly Bribri around the
indigenous reserve, small wooden signs advertising medicinal plant walks and
cacao tours stand uncertainly by the roadside. They nuance the existence of a Bribri
ecotourism around medicinal plants and the cottage industry production of plant
medicines that emerges in pockets, but is not very visible. The signs share a land-
scapes with other signs bearing statements in Spanish like, “I love Aspirin” and “I
love Alka-Seltzer,” hanging at the entrances of pulperías [small convenience stores],
35
Kohn (2013) enlarges understandings of representation beyond language to include nonhuman
life forms’ representations of the world.
What If There Is a Cure Somewhere in the Jungle… 151
I had asked Miss Hilda, an Afro Caribbean grandmother and a midwife, if I could
speak with her about her work with plant medicines. She has delivered much of the
community and is today impeded by public health regulations that make midwifery
and bush medicine illegal. The reasoning behind her silence speaks volumes. How
can we discuss plants without the context at hand? Culture is carried forward in
embodied actions, carried out on the land with plants. Roadsides used to be com-
mon places to see people collecting plant medicine. Several residents point out how
much this practice has diminished in recent decades, and the disappearance of vari-
36
Translated by the author from Spanish.
37
Participants also pointed out that there is less regulation of indigenous healers selling plant medi-
cine than Afro Caribbean bush doctors, attributed to greater attention to indigenous rights in the
country.
38
Many are being forced off their homesteads on the coast from Cahuita to Manzanillo, particularly
Afro Caribbean people. Ancestral lands and small restaurants, sodas, and businesses that are
located within fifty meters of the sea are in violation of the new beachfront law that now declares
it public area. The law is based on a static perception of the sea. The sea has been growing, hurling
its waves farther and farther inland, today hiding beaches, docks, and dwellings of the settlers
(Palmer 2005: 73).
152 N.-K. Ferenczi
ous medicinal plants that used to grow along roadsides, changes also noted else-
where.39 Miss Eliza, an Afro Caribbean mother and bush medicine doctor, describes
some of the challenges she faces, such as requiring a permit. “Let them come, I’m
not hiding. It’s true what they said” (that you need a permit and can go to jail for
making bush medicine). She explains that she must pay the Ministry of Health fifty
dollars a year, as well as the ministry in Limón. She smacks the table in five places
to indicate the various payments she must make to deal with the bureaucracy. “Now
it’s all money.” It is not with bitterness or cynicism that she emphasizes the way
capitalism has emerged, but with an unshakeable faith that “God will provide.”
I just am, in the moment, sharing what I know, transmitting knowledge, staying at the fam-
ily level. Some say I should make tea bags for export…who knows the future? I don’t sell
at the market. I use my restaurant. And I give away whatever is left over to schools, other
families and the senior residence.
Félix elaborates on the challenges he faces trying to do business with Europe and
North America. “In Costa Rica, there is very little business in medicinal plants.
Poorer countries have more commerce in medicinal plants.” He reasons, “why
doesn’t Costa Rica have as much? Because it is a less poor country. It is the process
of education that we have that is the big problem.” Ideas around legitimate medicine
have become so inculcated through public health discourse that there is very little
marketing of the vast medicinal plants available. Despite these challenges, he has
started a small business in medicinal plants and works with local indigenous groups.
Innovative projects supporting cottage industry production in some instances
contest the decontextualization of medicine even as they adjust to Western ideas of
legitimacy and function.
Old plastic Coca Cola bottles and baby food jars filled with tinctures, shampoos,
salves, insect repellants, and creams are neatly arranged on a small table. Maria belongs
to an indigenous women’s group that makes plant medicines sustainably produced by
women and youths in her community. She travels by bus to San José to sell their prod-
ucts at farmer’s markets and church bazaars. “Adelgazar.” “Tranquilizante.” The small
plastic bottles containing tinctures have their functions neatly printed: “To slim down,”
“relaxant.” Western descriptors for plants and “superfoods” such as “high in antioxi-
dants” or as effective “weight loss” medicine are emerging vocabularies. Tinctures,
capsules, and tea bags instantiate some of the shifting structures of plant medicines that
also shift sensorial experiences involved in preparing and ingesting medicine. The
translations and transformations are more in line with Euro-American ideas on how
medicine should look, and how it should taste, or rather, how it should not taste.40 Taste
is in some instances eliminated through capsule use, avoiding unfavorable bitter flavors
and stains left on teeth, removing the tongue’s role in signaling to the body how to
digest and optimally assimilate the medicine ingested.
When I ask Miss Eliza about the plant medicine she makes, she proudly shows
me her restaurant menu, featuring a list of medicinal juices and teas. The ingredients
39
See for example Osseo-Asare (2014: 33).
40
Stacey Langwick similarly observes the way the African healers she conducted research among
recast their medicine owing to biomedical concerns (2011: 6).
What If There Is a Cure Somewhere in the Jungle… 153
are listed alongside the ailments they are used to treat, recipes passed on to her from
her parents and grandparents. Her organic restaurant provides a space for her to
share her knowledge through her menu, and during workshops, guest lectures, and
volunteer programs organized via her website. As I flip through the pages of her
guestbook, I glance at the appreciative words of a doctor from South Africa, impart-
ing a sense of her global reach. She tells me that her next step is to set up a sanitar-
ium to offer closer attention.
Miss Eliza studied with a herbalist from San José to learn about dosage, something
that was not emphasized in the oral transmission of bush medicine knowledge passed
down to her from her father and grandfather. Both were bush medicine doctors.
When I started using them [plant medicines] it worked for me, but it’s important to know
what amount. So that’s what I was basically interested in and that’s why I went to herbalist
school, to get information about how much … how much to put. I follow a line from the
past, but with some (she makes a face) new things. They followed their instincts. They
studied nature so much. They didn’t read and write, but they studied the clouds to know if
it will rain, the birds fly one way they know something is coming […] Dosification is impor-
tant to learn, sometimes taking too much and it’s toxic, sometimes too little so it does noth-
ing. At herbal school I verified knowledge and everything was true. Ancestors knew, but
good to check with science to know exact amounts […] so it’s important to know the dosi-
fication, and that is where I respect science. Science is supposed to respect the principles
and knowledge from the people who didn’t go to school, because we have the practical part.
They have the theory, so theory and practical can meet together and work together.
I ask her about the Ayurvedic medicine in branded packages on display that stand
in contrast to the live medicinal juices being prepared in the kitchen.
We do the combination because lots of people know about the Ayurvedic and they use it, and
it’s like ah the scientific, and herbs, and we are just the traditional, and so it’s a good combi-
nation […] that is scientific and ours is just practical. […] The Ayurveda teach about la
temperatura, if you are a person that have hot, or if you cold they see that you can use this
type of medicine or you can use this type…it’s a science that they discover […] we didn’t
know that we can uh use certain type of medicine just for this type of people. That is what I
learned from them, they learned from me. […] So once more we prove that the home reme-
dies and the plants, the herbs, they have healing properties in them and basically they are
used for prevention, and your food also supposed to be for prevention, but also if you are sick
it depends on your diet, you can get healed [her voice rises intonating possibility] um, or you
can regenerate your organs also if your diet is just organic, natural, sustainable, using the
skins, and the leaf and the seeds of many of the, whether nuts or grains or vegetables.
She tells me about workshops and events that she organizes to teach people about
medicine, a pedagogical approach that involves reconstituting people and plant rela-
tionships against a backdrop of industrial food production.
The idea is to let people keep in, in that line but in a … it’s not like, when you say “medi-
cine” many people say “oh (no) medicine,” [implying something that tastes nasty] but medi-
cine is what you put in your food, the sweet pepper, and the garlic and the onion, all those
are medicine [pause] to prevent you from getting sick, but if you are sick, then you make a
specific syrup from it. But if you keep, if you put it in your daily food, you are already
preventing from virus, infection, allergies… and a lot of people now is a new, it’s like it’s in
style, allergies from everything, because they… industrialized food too much, you know,
and take out the natural properties and mix it in something else, and give you just what is
uh, refined. […] We used to just use our own grown and everything and then when the
industry brought in their…their market, they come and tell us stop using coconut oil, […]
154 N.-K. Ferenczi
so we…start drawing away and stop make our, our own things and depending on the indus-
tries, so that’s how the big supermarkets existed, because, they uh, they are lying to the
people, so you can support them. The oil they sell is rancid.
Like Don Miguel, Miss Eliza is explicitly trying to foster a broader perception of
medicine through informal education and games that teach her community to think
about medicine as emergent properties potentiated by relationships, such as cooking
sweet pepper, onions, and garlic. Contextualizing medicine also involves breaking
down distinctions between food and medicine, and between the food cabinet and the
medicine cabinet. Miss Eliza is trying to generate a more dynamic perception of
food as becoming medicine in certain contexts and combinations. She diversifies
plant profiles, they can be preventative or curative depending on whether they are
ingested when one is healthy or sick, and they can become medicine when com-
bined with other plants, or simply be a food.
Latour describes anthropocene as a useful term that integrates the historicity of the Earth, linking
41
ture of “going fast” produces social, ideological, and material consequences. “Going
slow is being colonized by the go fast economy” (Taussig 2013). The conservation of
information about plants is so entrenched in contemporary efforts in biodiversity
conservation that it easily comes to stand for knowledge in other types of transmis-
sion. Julie Cruikshank points out how the language of traditional ecological knowl-
edge often moves away from expressions of worldview and is increasingly intertwined
in bureaucracies, or other “tactical appropriations” (1998: 65).
Reformulations of nature in conservation discourse mandate a vigorous attention
to collapsing nature and society dualisms to truly support sustainability. This has
been examined elsewhere in research on “protected areas” that politicize relation-
ships between conservation and capitalism, and show how indigenous economic
participation is narrowly circumscribed within these articulated “Natures” (Büscher
2014; West 2005; West et al. 2006). Nature’s fragmentation is part of a colonial nar-
rative that is here examined in the context of cross-cultural encounters around plant
medicine.42 Neoliberal conservation and nature’s increasing abstraction undermine
cultural sustainability, as they are positioned around resources and land grabs for
professed “environmental ends.”43 In the words of a local journalist in Talamanca,
Eighty-eight percent of the land is protected by some kind of reserve. Who do you think
reserved it? [Long pause] The people. Governments declared them protected areas because
they have been protected by people before governments established the decree. The estab-
lishment of the laws to protect the environment come after people have really protected and
created it, co-created it with the rest of nature. […] So to us now, with the global politics of
what to do about the protection the environment, to us here the main political issue is: how
do you protect the environment today with global warming, with the deterioration of the
environment, with the policies of many corporations about grabbing the last of the natural
resources that are left in the world, how do you protect the environment, while protecting
the historical rights of people who co-created the environment and who have protected it.
That is the big challenge.
Part of the answer to this question lies in fostering a conceptual shift in under-
standings of nature, one that recognizes relationships between social and physical
environments and within biotic environments. Landscapes are deeply entwined in
social worlds and inner worlds, yet English definitions of landscape along with ter-
minologies for topographical features abstract “the environment” from people and
social practices; places become the “passive backdrop to human theatre” (Spirn
1998: 17). Wilderness, once a symbol of chaos in Western conceptions, is now por-
trayed in much environmentalist discourse as a “sacred symbol of undefiled nature”
42
Büscher et al. (2014: 12) show how the commoditization of nature has intensified in the neolib-
eral age. Büscher (2012: 29) characterizes neoliberal conservation as “the paradoxical idea that
capitalist markets are the answer to their own ecological contradictions” (cited in Büscher et al.
2014: 14).
43
Büscher et al. (2014: 15) discuss the paradoxical way neoliberal conservation “grabs green”
locally in the name of environmental sustainability (citing Fairhead et al. 2012b: 237). Neoliberalism
here refers to Foucault’s (2008: 260–71) way of perceiving, thinking and imagining, and a type of
governmentality that intervenes on the level of the environment rather than through the more
explicit internal subjugation of people (cited in Büscher et al. 2014: 8), as well as a smokescreen
of benevolence that actuates with reliance on free market policies that encourage privatization and
commoditization (Büscher et al. 2014: 6–7, in reference to Harvey 2005).
156 N.-K. Ferenczi
(Spirn 1998: 18), constructions that obscure the way people for a long time have
tended to “wilderness,” created “biotic assemblages,” and engaged in practices cur-
rently identified in Western scientific terminology as ornithology, ichthyology, ecol-
ogy, entomology, zoology, botany, and geology (Anderson 2005: 5, 41). Anderson
(2005) describes Western approaches to nature as two distinct manifestations of
abstraction, idealized as untouched by humans and a desire to insulate it from human
intervention, or replete with natural resources (thought to be inexhaustible) laying
idle, natural abundance going to waste, and missed opportunities for profit (91).
A third approach is “ecofunctional nature,” replacing the pristine with the pragmatic,
and the optimization of economic and ecological results (Igoe 2014: 214), in effect a
capitalist conservation mostly in the form of nature-based tourism (Brockington
et al. 2008). Sian Sullivan (2014) emphasizes new constitutions of material nature
and new means of tactical appropriation in contemporary “techno-configurations”
and the paradox of an “intensified lively circulation of new commodified digital units
of nonhuman nature intended to signify the incorporation of environmental harms
into productions of economic value,” and that of the “simultaneous dependence of
these lively representations and circulations on an amplified treatment of nonhuman
nature as distant, stilled, bounded, and mute object” (226). These constructions
ignore the fact that nonhuman elements are part of social environments (Pierotti
2011) and kincentric ways of perceiving the land (Anderson 2005), demonstrating
ontological commitments to strong nature–society dualisms.44
Concluding Remarks
“Kincentric,” meaning that nonhuman creatures are considered relatives (Anderson 2005: 57).
44
What If There Is a Cure Somewhere in the Jungle… 157
(117, 137). Variation in ecologies and subsistence affect the degree to which people
categorize and lexicalize, thus models derived from the structure of folk taxonomies
bias methodological approaches are not suitable to the ecological variation of land-
scape categories that are continuous, complex, and multidimensional (ibid.). Ellen
(2010) furthers that his research among the Nuaulu reflects much more flexibility
and variability in classifications, and a relatively small fixed lexical repertoire of
forest varieties (119). Nuaulu extensive knowledge is inevitably reduced by inter-
pretive approaches that assume “a single static classification” (ibid.). The conse-
quences of partitioning “being-in-the-world” into “plants,” “people,” and “animals”
signal a need for vigorous attention to meaning and interrelationships between
beings of this world, and with those beyond it, in ethnography (West 2005: 639).
For the Bribri, relationships within nature are in dynamic interaction with broader
relationships, ones potentiated by actions taken by people, plants, animals, and
stones, who can generate, evoke, or become a variety of supernatural beings,
whereby the so-called inanimate, “worldless” stone, too, exists in “lines of becom-
ing”; Sía have the potential to become jaguars, giant plague bearing hawks, or water
tigers.45 These relationships constitute Bribri identity, healing, and illness.
Recognition of these relationships is incommensurable with documenting plant
medicine in a singular way, as single-handedly enacting this or that “cure.” The nar-
ratives presented subvert the generification of plant medicines by decentering plants
and contextualizing “function” more broadly, to encompass interactions between
actors. They reveal the ways some seekers, healers, and academics are trying to
foster new ways of thinking about plants, food, and medicine. Miss Eliza, Félix, and
Don Miguel challenge their clients and visitors to think of medicine as emerging
from relationships. Miss Eliza clarifies distinctions between food and medicine by
emphasizing contexts for becoming medicine in certain food combinations. All
three participants emphasize soil as an important actor in producing strong medi-
cine, and Félix is trying to market his Hombre Grande as distinct and containing
more alkaloids than the Hombre Grande from elsewhere. Eugenio is hoping to
merge product and location in the marketing of herbal medicine to connect interest
in forest products with sustainable production, and foster valuations of the forest
that recognize it as a productive system. Lana questions the future of traditional
healing with fewer Bribri apprenticing, meanwhile the women’s groups making
cacao and plant medicines carry on cultural traditions in embodied actions, but with
modifications, like grafting trees or making tinctures. Explicit decentering of the
cognitive construction of nature in understandings of medicine is a reaction to the
imposition of perceptions of plants as bounded with isolated functions. Paradoxically
seekers looking for alternative treatments or traditional medicinal knowledge often
condition practices and knowledge to fit their biases around medicinal natures.
What seems to be opposition to the authority of allopathic medicine joins other
45
Ingold (2011), in reference to Heidegger’s (1995: 263) theses on the differences between an
inanimate object, like a stone, an animal, and a human being, paraphrases, “the stone is worldless;
the animal is poor in world; man is world-forming” (81). Ingold cites Deleuze and Guattari’s
(2000: 224–25) “lines of becoming,” alternately termed “lines of flight.”
158 N.-K. Ferenczi
Acknowledgements Thank you to all those who participated in this research, in particular those
healers in Talamanca whom I have highlighted here. Your hospitality and enlightening perspec-
tives are deeply appreciated. I am also grateful to Simon Fraser University and the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council for providing support to make this research possible, to Julie
Laplante for her instructive feedback, and most of all to my husband Sebastien Ouellette for his
continued support and help filming several interviews.
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Transmission, Sharing, and Variation
of Medicinal Plant Knowledge
and Implications for Health
John Richard Stepp
Introduction
of consensus, the list shortens to a couple hundred. The issue is further confounded
by variable transmission and sharing of knowledge between generations, house-
holds, and communities. We know that ethnobotanical knowledge is dynamic and
evolving but the act of codification and publishing imposes a static and authoritative
aura around what is an organic and vibrant process. Much has been made about the
role of anthropologists in creating a mythic “ethnographic present” (Fabian 1983).
We must also consider that we create an “ethnobotanical present” that, by its very
nature, obscures the nuances of transmission, sharing, and variation of knowledge.
In order to explore this topic of transmission, sharing, and variation, I present here
some examples based on my work with Highland Maya in Chiapas, Mexico over the
last 20 years. The Highland Maya are among the most studied peoples in the world,
with hundreds, if not thousands, of anthropologists and social scientists having
worked and still working in the region. The relatively intense focus on
Transmission, Sharing, and Variation of Medicinal Plant Knowledge… 165
contemporary Tzeltal and Tzotzil Maya (alternately spelled Tseltal and Tsotsil)
cultures has led to some significant insights but also, as often happens, to more
questions being developed than answers. Because so much has been written about
the Tzeltal and Tzotzil, I will be relatively brief in my introduction of them, instead
referring readers to a wide body of literature that began to rapidly grow starting in
1957 with the Harvard Chiapas Project (Vogt 1994) and continuing into the twenty-
first century (cf. Rus 2004). A particularly relevant work to the matters at hand is
found in Berlin et al. (2004). Both the Tzeltal and Tzotzil continue to grow in popu-
lation, with the most recent 2010 census estimating a population over the age of 5
of 445,846 for the Tzeltal and 404,705 for the Tzotzil (INEGI 2010).
One of the most striking, unfortunate, and sad aspects of life in Highland Chiapas
is the tremendous amount of illness that occurs. The types of illnesses encountered
are familiar to anyone who has worked in marginalized tropical communities. The
most common illnesses are gastrointestinal diseases (including general diarrhea,
bloody and mucoid diarrhea, abdominal pain, epigastric pain, and intestinal para-
sites) and respiratory diseases (coughs, chronic cough such as croup, tuberculosis,
inflammations of the nose, ears, and throat) (Berlin and Berlin 1996). These two
categories account for 87 % of illnesses (Stepp 2017). Fever, eye infections, and
mouth infections account for another 10 %. The remaining 3 % of illnesses involved
skin infections, headaches, breaks and sprains, injuries from accidents and violence,
teeth and mouth infections, mental illness, snakebites, and illnesses with supernatu-
ral etiologies. Despite an inordinate amount of attention paid by researchers in
Chiapas (e.g., Fabrega and Silver 1973; Holland 1963) to the treatment of illnesses
with supernatural etiologies, most illnesses in the Highlands are naturalistic in etiol-
ogy (cf. Foster 1976), empirically diagnosed and at least initially, self-treated.
Despite fairly widespread access to clinics, medicinal plants continue to be the
major source of healing for rural Tzeltal and Tzotzil Maya in the region.
Highland Maya medicinal plant knowledge is highly generalized, with any compe-
tent adult knowing, at a minimum, a core set of between 100 and 200 plants that
could be used to treat any of the common illnesses. It is also a mundane type of
knowledge, with discussion surrounding it being similar to asking someone what
they had for breakfast (Stepp 2002). This is not to diminish the role of specialized
healing in the region. In fact, healers play a highly significant role in health in rela-
tion to the psychological/spiritual/cosmological realm. While this may at first
glance appear contradictory, it is actually not surprising. In an environment where
everyone knows a lot about medicinal plants, specialized healing has to be value
added and go above and beyond the administering of phytomedicines. Specialized
healers instead provide a service that can be practiced by only select individuals and
intervene in illnesses that either initially present as supernatural in origin or move
into that category when naturalistic interventions through medicinal plants do not
166 J.R. Stepp
appear to be efficacious. This widespread knowledge of plants, and not just medici-
nal plants, is demonstrated by the fact that Brent Berlin in his seminal (1974) work
with Dennis Breedlove and Peter Raven was able to present a comprehensive and
exhaustive survey of ethnobotanical knowledge in the municipality of Tenejapa that
resulted in identifying 471 generic taxa and over 1600 plant species by working
with 4 primary collaborators in depth and 64 in total.
1971) and other alternative indices have been proposed but the use of Shannon–
Weiner persists to this day. Although it is relatively unknown with the social sci-
ences, the irony is that its development came from the study of human communication,
specifically within information theory in the 1940s, as a way to describe the capabil-
ity and stability of an information network (Shannon and Weaver 1949). In yet
another example of how the biological sciences have borrowed from the social sci-
ences (the most notable example being the “community” concept), in the 1950s
MacArthur (1955) and Margalef (1958, 1968) suggested its use as a measure of
diversity in ecology.
In its original form, the measure takes into account the number of different
responses or information units (richness) combined with the distribution of those
responses or information units (evenness). The ecologists simply replaced informa-
tion units with species and thus a measure of biodiversity was born. Begossi (1996)
later applied it to ethnobotanical data on use categories of plants but since that time
it has been used infrequently within the field.
When applied to the nine communities’ top treatments for the 25 most prevalent
illnesses, the results were as followed:
–– Intra-community H’ = .53
–– Intercommunity H’ = 2.97
–– Intra-ecological zone H’ = 1.81
As might be expected, variation within the community (i.e., between house-
holds) is relatively small. However, between communities, the variation increases
significantly, although the inherent mathematical formulation behind the Shannon–
Weaver index does not mean that there was approximately 6 times as much variation
between communities as one might assume from looking at the numbers. Regardless,
it does demonstrate that despite similar illness rates, access to medicinal plants and
most other things being equal, each community has some preferred cures for par-
ticular illnesses that differ from neighboring communities. This suggests that trans-
mission mainly takes place within each community and between households.
It is also useful to look at variation within each major ecological zone. In this
case, variation is lower than between all of the communities but still higher than
within a particular community. This supports the above hypothesis of transmission
occurring primarily within a community. Thus neighboring proximate communities
share some transmission but not at the same rate as within a community.
Much of this fits our common sense and our common experience of knowledge
transmission. Think about the last time you had an illness that was not severe enough
to warrant an intervention by a specialized healer (perhaps an allopathic physician)
but it limited your daily life to a degree where you sought out advice. You may have
first asked a family member if they had any suggestions and then expanded your
inquiry to neighbors or your colleagues at work. If none of those avenues of inquiry
were productive, you may have went onto a larger network of acquaintances or, in
this day and age, even the internet for advice.
168 J.R. Stepp
What are some factors that might account for Highland Maya medicinal plant
knowledge being both highly generalized but also variably compartmentalized within
communities? One that clearly emerges is long-term settlement within a region that
brings familiarity and use of the local flora. This is not to say that humans cannot
rapidly innovate and develop a phytopharmacopeia in an unfamiliar environment
(Casagrande 2005), but a body of knowledge that has been transmitted and tested over
generations is likely to have higher consensus and depth. There are also relatively low
rates of acculturation and language loss in the area, as evidenced by both a high rate
of monolingual speakers of Tzeltal and Tzotzil, and the persistence of the native lan-
guage as the first language spoken at home even in cases of bilingual households.
Another major factor that I mentioned previously is a high rate of illness events.
While Highland Maya communities show remarkable persistence in retaining and
transmitting knowledge of medicinal plants that are used infrequently, many of the
medicinal plants used are regularly employed throughout the year due to the high rate
of infectious disease, primarily gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses (Berlin and
Berlin 1996). There is also, as previously mentioned, an emic view of self-healing as
a mundane and common activity. For common illnesses, people self-administer
medicinal plants and usually only in cases of pernicious or unknown illness do they
consult others. Because the average person knows so much about medicinal plants to
start with, they are less likely to initiate conversations with others, thus reducing the
flow of information across households and communities. This paradox allows for
vertical transmission of knowledge but greatly reduces horizontal flow.
The above factors are primarily social but there are also some significant eco-
logical and socio-ecological factors at play. Highland Maya live on and around what
I call a “living pharmacy,” a medicinal plant commons where most of the important
medicinal plants grow wild and can be readily obtained for free without traveling
more than 1–2 km from the household at most (Stepp 2017). While there is some
limited cultivation of medicinal plants, these too tend to be close by within the home
garden area. Surrounding the household are a patchy mosaic of different stages of
vegetational succession so even plants that have more restricted habitats have a
home somewhere nearby.
Related to the idea of a medicinal plants commons is the almost complete absence
of a market for local medicinal plants. Although urban markets in the region do sell
medicinal plants, they are generally those medicinal plants that are considered
nonindigenous or found more commonly in other parts of Mexico (and beyond,
even noni fruit from Polynesia has made an appearance in urban markets in recent
years). Highland Maya rarely dry medicinal plants and instead prefer to utilize fresh
plant material. This is curious when compared to other indigenous communities to
the north in Mexico and the south into Guatemala where it is common to find drying
of medicinal plants. However, from a biochemical perspective, it makes good sense
since many more volatile low molecular weight bioactive compounds are lost or
transformed when dessicated.
Transmission, Sharing, and Variation of Medicinal Plant Knowledge… 169
Another possible reason for variation across communities is related to the abundance
of medicinal plants available within a given community. Highland Maya have options.
For a particular type of illness, they may have several dozen different plants to choose
from. Although all of these plants may not be considered to be equally efficacious from
an emic perspective, it would not be uncommon to find agreement that a few plant spe-
cies would be equally effective. Under this scenario, personal preferences (which may
be shared between households of related family members and throughout the commu-
nity but not beyond) might come into play, leading to the likelihood that variation will
occur between communities. This abundance of riches hypothesis is not without paral-
lels in other cultures. For example, Shepard (2004) found that despite sharing very simi-
lar biophysical environments and living next to each other, the Matsigenka and Yora in
the lowland Amazon of Peru had notably different pharmacopeias.
Conclusions
Although this chapter has focused on medicinal plants used for common illnesses,
variation in medicinal plant knowledge for uncommon illnesses is even more pro-
nounced. It is within this realm that the limited transmission of knowledge across
communities may have more serious health implications. One could imagine a com-
munity innovating an effective treatment for an uncommon illness that is more prev-
alent in another community that has not devised the same or similar treatment. Unless
there was significant contact between the two communities, it may take months or
years before a knowledge transmission event occurs. Regardless, the fact that there
is so much medicinal plant knowledge held in common between communities sug-
gests that while transmission events may be rare, they do have an impact and house-
holds are willing to try new plant cures and then stick with ones that are found to be
effective. The variation problem will always be present in our attempts to understand
the complexities surrounding medicinal plant knowledge, and we ignore it at great
detriment to a deeper appreciation of cultural transmission and sharing.
Acknowledgements This work represents some evolving thoughts that have been greatly influ-
enced by friends and colleagues in the field including David Casagrande, George Luber, Felice
Wyndham, Rebecca Zarger and, most importantly, Brent Berlin and Elois Ann Berlin who opened
so many doors for my work in Chiapas. I reserve my greatest appreciation for the Tzeltal and
Tzotzil Maya of Highland Chiapas who have taught me so much. I would also like to thank Liz
Olson, whose hard work and dedication made this volume possible.
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Index
A Bebshay, 75
Academic studies, 73 Beparies, 69
Air Mancur, 37, 48 Beras kencur, 31, 34, 46
Aloe vera, 69, 80 Betel leaf, 53
Alpinia galanga, 39 Biocultural approach, 11–13
Alternative medical systems, 87 Biographical vignettes
Amazonia, 93, 95, 113 Daniel (Iridologist and Natural Healer),
background, 98–100 126–127
ecuadorian ethnobotanical inquiry, Debra (Homeopathic Physician), 126
103–104 Fernanda (Natural Healer, Chiropractor,
ethnographic setting, 96–97 Masseuse), 127–128
health and body, 100–103 Biomedical approach, 55
methods, 98 Biomedical models, 10
Napo Runa, 97 Biomedicine, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13
notions of body, 101–103 Bixa orellana L., 148
Andean-Amazonian corridor, 96 Black-box, 14
Anthropocene, 154 Box elemuy, 5
Arnica, 5 Bribri healers, 134
Arswagandha, 84 Bribri soup kitchen, 140
Asignifying rupture, 58
Asli, 38
Auras, 52 C
Autlán (Mexico), 118, 119, 123–129 Cabe puyang, 31
Awapa, 134 Cancha cubierta, 98
Ayahuasca, 136, 139, 140, 142, 145 Cartography, 59
Ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi), 103 Cemani chicken, 45
Ayurvedic Aushad Shilpa Samity, 86 Chakmoolche, 5
Ayurvedic medicine, 153 Chile peppers, harvesting, 108
Ayurvedic Medicine Manufacturing Board, 86 Chunhuhub, 2–4, 7, 8
Community gardens, 76–79
Community Herbal Healthcare (CHH), 68, 69,
B 72, 74
Balai Pengobatan Tradisional, 51 Community nursery, 77
Balsa wood (Ochroma Pyramidale), 149 Co-performative witnessing, 141
Bashok, 29, 38, 81, 84 Cortinas verdes (Herbalife vendors), 126
Costa Rica, 138–145, 152 Hombre Grande (Quassia Amara), 145, 157
Curcuma, 31, 54 Homeopathy, 121–126, 128–130
Curcumin, 60 Human–plant nexus, 17
D I
Daily Star, 70 Iboga (Tabernanthe iboga), 139, 145
Daniel (Iridologist and Natural Healer), Ibogaine, 145
126–127 Ilmu getaran, 53
Daun Sirih, 53 Indigenous health knowledge (IHK), 75
Debra (Homeopathic Physician), 126 Information and communication technology
Decalcomany, 59 (ICT), 86
Development of Biotechnology and Inner force, 26
Environmental Conservation Centre Inner power techniques, 26
(DEBTEC), 86 Instituto Nacional de Seguro Social, 122
Dhukun, 25
Drug addict, 142
Dukhun, 52 J
Jago, 48
Jamu
E cluster, 28, 29, 32
Ejido system, 2 beras kencur, 34
Emergent medicines, 136, 139, 150–154 curcuma, 31
Empon-empon, 39 elixirs, 31
Ethnobiology, 156 empon-empon, 39
Ethnobotany, 136, 139, 140, 142, 144, 158 herbal remedies, 30
Ethnographic setting, 97 Javanese philosophy, 41
kayu manis, 36
kunir asam, 31
F kunir asem, 35, 36
Fernanda (Natural Healer, Chiropractor, kunyit asem, 34
Masseuse), 127–128 maag, 32
mandingan, 39
masih Jawa asli, 38
G masuk angin, 38
Gajer oshud, 77 pipisan, 37, 38
Galian jamu, 31 puyang, 34
Getaran, 27 rempah-rempah, 36
sirih, 35
temuireng, 35
H temulawak, 35
Ha’abin, 8, 9 uyup-uyup, 34
Hawaiian fruit noni (Morinda citrifolia), 7 and Java
Healer, 136 animism, 19
Healing technique, 133 balance and harmony, 22
Health organizations, 71 balancing hot and cold, 22
Heliconia aemydiana, 102 bioresources, 22
Herbal medicinal plants, 74 breastmilk, 22
Herbal policies and politics, 85–88 classic ground, 19
Herbal remedies, 30 complex and multilayered culture, 20
Hierbateros, 126 cosmetic strand, 22
Highland Maya medicinal plant knowledge, as endangered species, 23
165, 168 herbal medicine, 23
Index 173
V
T Vegetal life, 44
Tabib, 48
Talamanca, 133, 134, 136–140, 142, 146, 155,
158 W
Taman Siswa, 44 Wako ak’ (Aristolochia maxima), 6
Tankasche’ (Zanthoxylum caribaeum), 6 Wanduj (Brugmansia suaveolens), 103
Teas, 9 Wañui, 94
Temascales, 127 Warung Jamu Ginggang, 48–50
Temuireng, 35 Wilderness, 155
Tenaga dalam (inner power), 26, 27, 52, 59 Women in Development (WID), 78
Tenaga lingkungan, 28
Terminal cancer patient, 142
The South Asia Enterprise Development Y
Facility (SEDF), 82 Yogyakarta (Jogja), 18
Therapeutic emplotments, 142 Yucatec Maya medicine
Traditional indigenous medicine, 137 biocultural approach, 11–13
Traditional Jamu Café, 42 dimensions, 2–9
Traditional medicine, 120 healers and u ng medicines, 9–11
Tree, 44, 60, 61 introduction, 1–2