In conversation with Thomas Stodulka

My current research topic emerged from a long ethnographic engagement with questions of care, commons, and collaborative forms of knowledge construction and application. Since the early 2000s, I have been working with marginalized groups in Indonesia and have learned that knowledge, care, and survival are rarely separate spheres.

Since 2019, I have been working closely with the permaculture movement in Timor-Leste, particularly with Permatil. I do not view this work as classic “field research,” but rather as a co-production of knowledge: research here takes place in gardens, schools, village communities, and training sessions, together with practitioners, teachers, activists, and young people.

This is precisely where the proximity to public anthropology lies: my research is not primarily aimed at academic self-referentiality, but at social and ecological interventions. It asks how anthropological knowledge can contribute to ecological justice, food sovereignty, decolonial education, and social and ecological resilience—and how research itself becomes part of these processes.

Timor-Leste is located at the intersection of Southeast Asia and Oceania, between Indonesia, Papua, and Australia, and is one of the world's youngest nation-states. After centuries of Portuguese colonial rule and a violent Indonesian occupation, the country gained its independence in 2002.

The lived realities are strongly influenced by this history: many families have experienced violence, loss, and structural poverty. At the same time, there is remarkable social solidarity, strong local knowledge systems, and a pronounced relationship with the environment.

The education system faces major challenges: limited resources, linguistic diversity (Tetum, Portuguese, local languages), and unequal access between urban and rural areas. This is precisely where permaculture education comes in, combining learning with everyday practices, nutrition, the environment, and community.

Permaculture education is an exemplary field in which key anthropological questions converge: How is knowledge passed on? How are human-environment relationships and formations of self and personhood shaped and aspired to? How do collective futures emerge under conditions of global inequality?

Social Anthropology can show here that education is not just a formal, state-run project, but a relational, embodied, and situated process. Permaculture education reveals how learning about and with soil, water, plants, and care is also learning about social responsibility, history, and the future.

In the current geopolitical context, marked by climate crisis, postcolonial inequalities, multiple crises, and wars, Timor-Leste’s permaculture demonstrates something crucial: global solutions do not necessarily originate in the Global North. Permaculture education in Timor-Leste is not a niche project, but rather a response to global questions of food sovereignty, resilience, and educational equity. It contradicts extractivist development models and shows how local communities address global crises with locally anchored knowledge and global exchange. This is precisely where its geopolitical relevance lies: it shifts the focus away from “development aid” or nation-state narcissism toward reciprocal learning processes.

In Germany, too, we face questions that permaculture education in Timor-Leste addresses very clearly: How, for example, do we combine education with ecological responsibility? How do we strengthen communities and cooperation despite differences of opinion and political differences in the face of isolation and crises? How can we learn to think in terms of long-term relationships with places despite flight, displacement, and excessive mobility? Our research invites us to understand education not only as the transfer of knowledge, but as a practice of commoning—as a shared concern for social and ecological livelihoods. This is just as relevant in Germany as it is in Timor-Leste.

I would want us to have learned to understand the future not as a technical problem, but as a social, cultural, and ecological relationship. Specifically, I would hope that educational institutions are more closely connected to local communities and environments, or that care, nursing, and ecological work are more highly valued by society. I hope that we have taken seriously what movements such as Permatil have been practicing for years, namely that sustainable futures can only be created together and that by acknowledging, enduring, and bridging differences constructively – including political ones – through emancipated yet empathetic and open debates, we might fare better as societies and persons in achieving common goods and (more-than-human) wellbeing. Even if the time capsule were to spit me out again in 50 years, I would not be disappointed by the long-term nature of these changes. With time and age, one becomes a little more patient, especially as a social and cultural anthropologist.