Cultural Anthropology Program – Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants (CA-DDRIG)

The Cultural Anthropology Program awards Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants (DDRIGs) in all areas of cultural anthropological science supported by the Program. 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. DDRIGs support the development of the next generation of cultural anthropologists to pursue those questions.

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, humanistic understanding, or applied policy. 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
• Scientific principles underlying conflict, cooperation, and altruism
• Economy, culture, migration, and globalization
• Variability and change in kinship and family norms and practices
• General cultural and social principles underlying the drivers of specific 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)