The NSF DDRIG in Cultural Anthropology provides funding for fieldwork and other research costs not normally covered by the grantee’s university. UChicago doctoral candidates should consult the SSRC DDRIG toolkit for program dates, timelines and other institutional requirements.
Project budgets should be developed at scales appropriate for the work to be conducted. The total direct costs for DDRIG in Cultural Anthropology may not exceed $25,000; applicable indirect costs are in addition to (that is, on top of) that amount.
Eligible Research
The primary objective of the Cultural Anthropology Program is to support basic scientific research on the causes, consequences, and complexities of human social and cultural variability.
Anthropological research spans a wide gamut, and contemporary cultural anthropology is an arena in which diverse research traditions and methodologies are valid. Recognizing the breadth of the field’s contributions to science, the Cultural Anthropology Program welcomes proposals for empirically grounded, theoretically engaged, and methodologically sophisticated research in all sub-fields of cultural anthropology. Because the National Science Foundation’s mandate is to support basic research, the NSF Cultural Anthropology Program does not fund research that takes as its primary goal improved clinical practice or applied policy. A proposal that uses anthropological methods to understand a social problem but does not propose to make a theory-testing and/or theory expanding contribution to anthropology will be returned without review.
Program research priorities include, but are not limited to, research that increases our understanding of:
- Socio-cultural drivers of critical anthropogenic processes such as deforestation, desertification, land cover change, urbanization, and poverty
-
Resilience and robustness of socio-cultural systems
-
Conflict, cooperation, and altruism
-
Economy, culture, migration, and globalization
-
Variability and change in kinship and family norms and practices
-
Cultural and social drivers of health outcomes and disease transmission
-
Social regulation, governmentality, and violence
-
Origins of complexity in socio-cultural systems
-
Language and culture: orality and literacy, sociolinguistics, and cognition
-
Human variation through empirically grounded ethnographic descriptions
-
Mathematical and computational models of sociocultural systems such as social network analysis, agent-based models, multi-level models, and modes that integrate agent-based simulations and geographic information systems (GIS)