Manvir Singh

Manvir Singh is a cognitive and evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California, Davis. He graduated with an ScB from Brown University in 2012 and a PhD in human evolutionary biology from Harvard University in 2020. His research examines why human societies regularly develop strikingly similar complex cultural traditions, such as music, myth, justice, shamanism, and beliefs in supernatural punishment. He combines long-term ethnographic fieldwork, mostly among Mentawai communities in Indonesia, with the construction and analysis of large-scale, cross-cultural databases. His first book is “Shamanism: The Timeless Religion” (Knopf, 2025).
Presentation Video Link: Chasing Universality: The Case of Music