Therapeutic Efficacy as Line of Flight
Therapeutic efficacy is at the heart of medical anthropology interested in diverse healing practices across the world. We here take up this debate once again based on fieldwork conducted within jamu practices in Yogyakarta (Jogja) in Java, Indonesia. The daily preparation and consumption of beverages made with fresh plants, rhizomes, spices, barks that we roll, press, mash and liquefy evokes a therapeutic efficacy situated in lived experience. We borrow from merleau-pontian phenomenology of perception, deleuzo-guattarian rhizomatic thought and Javanese philosophy of the body to understand therapeutic efficacy as a line of flight or of deterritorialization. Doing so, we recall that that therapeutic efficacy reduced to infra-phenomenal causal correlations, as in the current scientific standard of the randomized clinical trial (RCT), does not exhaust the human experience of the therapeutic process.