Funder: U.S. National Science Foundation
Due Dates: January 15, 2027 (Full proposals) | March 1, 2027 (REG/REU optimal target) | August 15, 2027 (Full proposals)
Funding Amounts: $4 million estimated program funding; senior awards rarely exceed $120,000 annually for up to 36 months
Summary: Supports fundamental cultural anthropology research and training that advances generalizable understanding of human social and cultural variability.
Key Information: Research must center theory generation or testing, not immediate clinical, policy, or other applied solutions.
Description
The NSF Cultural Anthropology Program supports systematic research and training across all subfields of cultural anthropology, at any temporal or spatial scale. Projects should produce empirically grounded findings that generalize beyond individual case studies and advance anthropological theories of human society and culture. The program is administered by the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences within the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.
Supported approaches include ethnographic fieldwork, surveys, experiments, archival and collections research, biomarkers, remote sensing, and mathematical or computational modeling. The program welcomes convergent research across scientific fields and particularly encourages ethnographically grounded projects connecting local and global processes. Use-inspired research can qualify, but advancing theory must remain central; proposals focused solely on solving social, medical, or other practical problems are returned without review.
