Matt Abel – Secretary Treasurer Candidate 2025
Matt Abel
Southern Methodist University
Secretary-Treasurer Candidate 2025
Matt Abel is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is an economic anthropologist whose research focuses on extractive resource economies in the Brazilian Amazon and the relationship between shifting global trade networks and local patterns of technological change. Abel’s scholarship has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Economic Anthropology, Rural Sociology, and the NACLA Report on the Americas, as well as edited volumes in English and Portuguese. His work has been funded by grants and fellowships from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the US-Brazil Fulbright Commission, and the National Science Foundation. His current book project, The Forest and the Factory: Debt, Development, and Community in the Brazilian Amazon, recounts an intergenerational history of environmental justice organizing and the struggle of Amazonia’s farmers, fishers, and agroforesters to transform the failures of twentieth-century modernization policies into twenty-first century demands for healthcare, environmental protections, and other forms of social inclusion. As an economic anthropologist with historical inclinations, Abel is enthusiastic at the prospect of contributing to the SALSA board as Secretary-Treasurer to maintain the organization’s finances and contribute to preserving the society’s institutional memory.