Cultural Anthropology

National Science Foundation
Deadline: January 15; August 15, 2011

The Cultural Anthropology Program supports basic scientific research about the causes, consequences, and complexities of human social and cultural variability. Cultural anthropologists analyze human social and cultural behavior holistically, This integrated approach makes anthropology a valuable research tool for understanding the modern world. Because cultural patterns are emergent over time and space, there is no single natural scale for ethnographic and ethnological analysis. In some cases, cultural patterns may emerge from the collective behavior of large ensembles of smaller scale units; in others, they may be imposed by larger scale constraints. The origins of social and cultural variability may be remote from the scale at which they are observed. Therefore, research may target any appropriate scale or scales from local to regional to global. The Program encourages innovative research that contributes to building spatially and temporally specific theory that extends understanding beyond individual case studies.

For more information: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5388