Recent event drew the attention of many on the food security and resilience issues. Climate change also questions our capacity to produce food and minimize our impact on soil, water, and biodiversity. The lack of dynamism of the rural areas and the crisis the conventional farmers are going through, forces us to look at other horizons. Permaculture farming, a concept created in the 70’s during the oil crisis, already questioned the conventional farming model and its long-term sustainability, almost ten years before the Brundtland report. Now the permaculture principles have spread in various parts of the world, permaculture farms can be found in many countries, with different climates and different practices. But what about Sweden? In this study we looked at the permaculture farming in the Swedish context. We will try to uncover the processes and realities behind it, we tried to look at the establishment process in the first time, then we focus on the personal motives behind this establishment. In a third question we questioned how they create local or global interactions through their farm and finally we interrogated how this contribute to the placemaking of the communities they are implanted in. To answers those questions, we used the theories of placemaking, neo-endogenous rural development and sustainable livelihoods. We proceeded to four interviews with permaculture practitioners, all located in Sweden. The data we gathered and analyzed through a thematic analysis showed that the farmers engaged in a variety of interactions with their community and even beyond. The results underline the significant role of these farmers in creating dynamism in their rural community and being active actors of the placemaking of their communities. Moreover, the study depicts the potential and the current limitations that farmers are facing. The study shows that permaculture farmers can be important actors of local dynamism if they are supported by their community and institutional structures. In other word they can create the rural development everybody is looking for.

From 1613 to 1623, the English East India Company (EIC) maintained a trading post at Hirado, Japan. This trading post was one of the first that the EIC established, and because England was far from the empire it would one day become, Company members had to adjust to local customs and respect the laws of Japan in order to conduct business there. Among the many adaptations the EIC factors underwent, frequent visits to the Tokugawa shogun’s court were required of the EIC. This thesis will investigate the EIC’s journeys to the shogun’s court as well as its time at court to study the way in which the English interacted with the Japanese and conformed to Japanese society. This thesis will also discuss practices of gift giving in which the English participated. This study uses the diary of Richard Cocks, the head of the Hirado trading post, to focus on the period between 1615 and 1622. Alison Games’s concept of “cosmopolitanism” and Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s concept of “connected histories” frame this study to demonstrate how England’s and the EIC’s relatively weak status at the beginning of the seventeenth century required EIC members to assimilate into Japanese society. The EIC’s experiences while traveling through Japan, visiting the shogun’s court, and exchanging gifts emphasized the power difference between the EIC and the Tokugawa shogunate and other high-ranking Japanese. The policies the shogunate enforced to strengthen its authority and prevent rebellions also required the EIC to demonstrate their subservience to the shogun’s power, which affected the Company’s ability to trade. Since the English did not hold the authority to make demands of the shogun, they were forced to abide by the laws and customs of the land, which only further served to emphasize their subordinate position to the shogunate.