Human Environmental Relationships in the Lower Illinois River Valley

My Research

I am an environmental anthropologist who studies food and agriculture systems in South Asia, Eastern Europe, and North America. Food and farming are starting places to ask fundamental questions concerning how we learn about the world around us, how we come to shape the landscapes where we live, and even what impact our culture has on the microscopic worlds within us.

My research has led me to explore the human experiences behind biotechnology and organic agriculture in India, heritage foods and climate change in Bosnia’s mountain gardens, the decisions and aspirations of the next generation of Midwestern farmers, and the influence of food traditions and fermentation on the human microbiome. To study these issues and examine the changing social and ecological worlds where we live, I use a social science toolkit that includes ethnography, spatial analysis, interviews, surveys, ethnobotany, and photography.

Environmental knowledge, and the relationships and affects that continually shape it, grow within a larger political context that includes everything from biotechnology to microbial legislation to ethical supply chains. My work in anthropology uses seeds and microbes as heuristics to explore how we shape and are shaped by the social, political, economic, and ecological worlds around us.

This ongoing project combines approaches from historical ecology and political ecology to ask how people have created sustainable agricultural systems in a single place over the span of 2,000 years given natural and political constraints. Bringing together approaches from archaeology, history, ecology, and anthropology, this project sees the landscape as a palimpsest on which story of environmental management is continually written. This project is funded in part through the Library of Congress Blanton Owen Award, the Lynne Cooper Harvey Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates (NSF-REU) project: Long-term Perspectives on Human-River Dynamics at the Confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers: Interdisciplinary Research for Students in Ecology and Archeology (Grant #1460787) (Buikstra PI).

Publications related to this project:

Flachs, Andrew and Matthew Abel. 2018. “An Emerging Geography of the Agrarian Question: Spatial Analysis as a tool for Identifying the New American Agrarianism.” Rural Sociology, published online October 3, 2018.