Resource Guide
Research Project Ideas in Anthropology for High School Students
Specific, comparative questions across social organisation, ritual and belief, identity and power, and medical anthropology — with guidance on using ethnographic literature rigorously.
How to Use This List
Anthropology asks what it means to be human by studying human diversity: how different societies organise themselves, make meaning, and solve the common problems of social life in strikingly different ways. A research project in anthropology takes a specific question about that diversity and investigates it through ethnographic literature, comparative analysis, and theoretical engagement.
The key anthropological move is defamiliarisation: treating practices that seem natural or inevitable as culturally specific choices, and practices that seem alien as locally coherent. A project that achieves this, using the comparative evidence that ethnography provides, is doing real anthropological thinking. Our guide to writing a research question helps frame a focused comparative enquiry.
Ideas by Sub-Field
Social organisation & kinship
- ↳ How do different societies organise family and kinship, and what social work does kinship do beyond biology?
- ↳ What does the anthropology of gift exchange reveal about economic behaviour that markets obscure?
- ↳ How do different communities define and manage the boundary between kin and non-kin?
Ritual, belief & culture
- ↳ What social functions do ritual practices serve, and how does anthropology distinguish them from practical action?
- ↳ How have anthropologists explained the cultural diversity of religious belief, and how convincing are those explanations?
- ↳ What does a close reading of ethnographic accounts of a specific cultural practice reveal about underlying values?
Identity, power & the state
- ↳ How is ethnicity constructed and mobilised, and what does anthropology reveal about its social rather than biological nature?
- ↳ What do ethnographies of bureaucracy reveal about how states are experienced by those who live with them?
- ↳ How have indigenous communities negotiated identity and rights in relation to nation-states?
Medical & environmental anthropology
- ↳ How do cultural beliefs shape the experience and treatment of illness in a particular community?
- ↳ What does medical anthropology reveal about the social determinants of health beyond the clinical perspective?
- ↳ How do different communities understand and relate to the natural environment, and what are the practical consequences?
Taking Cultural Diversity Seriously
What makes anthropology intellectually distinctive is its insistence on taking the practices and beliefs of other societies seriously on their own terms, before evaluating them. That discipline of understanding before judging is harder than it sounds, and applying it consistently to a research question produces a kind of cultural analysis that is genuinely rare at school level.
A mentor helps a student engage with ethnographic literature carefully, avoid the common pitfall of projecting their own assumptions onto other societies, and write with the measured, comparative register that anthropological analysis demands. That skill, taking cultural diversity seriously as data, transfers well to medicine, international relations, law, and many social science fields.
Taking a Question Further
Anthropology overlaps with sociology, history, medicine, and politics. For related guides, see our companion pages on sociology and medicine, our Humanities & Media field page, and our broader research project ideas across all six fields. When you are ready to develop a project with a mentor who works in the field, the Research Scholar programme is built for exactly that.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does anthropology research look like at school level?
Anthropology at school level is mostly desk-based: analysing ethnographic literature, comparing how different societies handle a common human challenge, or examining the anthropological dimensions of a cultural practice or institution. Original fieldwork, such as conducting ethnographic interviews, is possible with careful design but is not required for a strong project.
What is the difference between social and cultural anthropology?
Social anthropology focuses on social organisation, kinship, politics, and institutions; cultural anthropology emphasises meaning, symbols, beliefs, and cultural practices. In practice, the two overlap substantially at the research level, and most university departments teach them together. Both use ethnography as their primary method and share a comparative, cross-cultural perspective.
What background do I need?
None specific. Students arrive through history, biology, philosophy, or languages. What matters is genuine curiosity about human diversity and a willingness to suspend the assumption that one's own cultural practices are normal or natural. A mentor introduces the theoretical frameworks and ethnographic literature the project needs.
Is anthropology useful for university applications?
Directly for anthropology, archaeology, and social science courses, and valuable for medicine (the cultural dimensions of health), law (legal anthropology and rights), development, and international relations applications. The anthropological perspective, taking culture seriously as a shaping force, is genuinely distinctive in application pools dominated by more conventional social science approaches.
Summer cohort deadline · Applications due June 25. A few places remain. We assess applications in order of receipt.
ScholarBridge matches students with doctoral-level or equivalent research mentors across six academic fields. Every project is student-led and completed to a standard the student can stand behind in any university interview.
Explore all programmes