The Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures (RCC) project and its successor projects, Studies in Soviet Culture (SSC) Studies in Contemporary Culture (SCC), and Study Program of Human Health and the Ecology of Man (HEC), were a series of interrelated anthropological studies of societies inaccessible via direct observation that took place between 1947 and 1956. The RCC was inaugurated by Ruth Benedict at Columbia University with funding from a grant from the United States Office of Naval Research Human Resources division. Following Benedict's death in 1948, the research was continued and expanded in a series of successor projects by Margaret Mead, Rhoda Métraux, and colleagues at the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University. These projects were among later entries in the now-defunct genre of national character studies: anthropological studies conducted during and immediately after World War II into the cultures of national and ethnic groups and the influence of those cultures on individuals' behavior.

The study of culture at a distance, according to Mead and Rhoda Métraux's 1953 manual of the same title, was an interdisciplinary approach developed by Benedict and expanded upon by Mead and their colleagues, which combined historical and anthropological methods to study cultures rendered temporally, spatially, and/or administratively inaccessible. For example, the Studies in Soviet Culture and RCC China research adopted this approach "due to barriers to travel and research." Meanwhile, the RCC studies of Jewish small towns, or shtetls, in Poland and Ukraine investigated societies the researchers explained had been "physically destroyed and the survivors scattered." Benedict also used the approach in her wartime studies of Japanese culture, commissioned by the Office of War Information and published in 1946 as The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

RCC and successor project studies focused on cultural characteristics of nations they identified and described as follows: China, Czechoslovakia, The East European Jews before World War II, France, Great Russia before 1917, Poland, Syria, Germany, and the contemporary Soviet Union. "Brief preliminary explorations" of Italian and Spanish culture were also included in the projects. Studies analyzed cultural products including film, literature, and advertisements, but primarily focused on interviews with informants. These were people who had lived in the nations under study: immigrants, the children of immigrants, refugees, students studying abroad in the United States, and sometimes people from the United States who had lived abroad for extended periods. Informants were also sometimes administered projective tests, such as Rorschach tests.

More than 120 researchers from fourteen academic disciplines contributed to the RCC and its successors. The projects had a circular design in order to avoid the development of hierarchical structure or "vested interests," in which researchers were organized into groups by the cultures they studied, by approach or method, and into temporary groups for accomplishing specific tasks such as drafting reports on particular topics. Each senior researcher occupied at least two roles of different statuses in different groups; for example, convener in one group, and member in another. All project members met for General Seminars every two weeks. Each study's findings were summarized in final project reports.

The applicability of Soviet and Chinese cultural studies to U.S. geopolitical interests in the context of the early Cold War explains the expansiveness and abundance of resources afforded to this work. The Studies in Soviet Culture and Studies in Contemporary Cultures A projects, both directed by Margaret Mead, investigated the Soviet national character. RCC China included a detailed analysis of Chinese political character, while the Study Program of Human Health and the Ecology of Man investigated cultural factors related to the health of subjects of Chinese heritage in New York City. The Studies in Contemporary Cultures B project, directed by Rhoda Métraux, addressed German national character, a subject of similar interest to American military and political policy makers after the descent of the Iron Curtain. The Studies in Soviet Culture project was funded by the Rand Corporation, while the Studies in Contemporary Cultures project was funded partially by the Office of Naval Research and partially by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies.