Manvir Singh is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Professor Singh is a cognitive and evolutionary anthropologist who regularly uses ethnographic data from eHRAF World Cultures in his research. A graduate of Brown University, Singh earned a Ph.D. in Human Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University where he is affiliated with the Culture, Cognition, Coevolution Lab. Singh publishes scholarly work and also writes essays for non-academic audiences, including The Atlantic and The New Yorker.

Singh was recently featured in this interview in honor of HRAF’s 75th Anniversary.

Singh’s new book, Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, is the end-product of over a decade of research and travel. The book offers a fascinating exploration of the spiritual practice of shamanism, from its earliest practitioners to contemporary times. Although scholarly in its approach, the book appeals to a popular audience, particularly readers dissatisfied with organized religion who are interested in alternative approaches to spirituality.

Some of the questions examined in the book include:

• What are the origins of shamanism, and what is its future?
• Do shamans believe in their powers?
• What exactly is trance?
• What can we learn from indigenous healing practices?

Shamanism: The Timeless Religion investigates why societies so often turn to mediums, trance-healers, and ecstatic prophets, and what this tells us about the human mind and the future of religion. A mash-up of memoir, journalism, and anthropological fieldwork, the book is just as much about Singh’s journey to understand shamanism—from Indonesia to the Colombian Amazon, Burning Man to a Paleolithic cave in southwest France—as it is about culture and psychology. You can listen to an audiobook sample here or read this excerpt published in The Guardian.

During his travels, Singh lived with shamans and observed religious traditions including indigenous healing ceremonies, musical performances, and altered states of consciousness. The appeal of shamanism stems from psychological resonance and the promise of spiritual transformation. Singh suggests that shamanism has historically been misunderstood and he argues that Western medicine can learn from shamanistic practices. He believes that by studying humanity’s oldest spiritual practice, we can come to better understand the human experience. “With this book, I’m making the argument that shamanism reflects universal aspects of human psychology, and how, despite our tendency to associate shamanism with remote societies and the deep past, elements of it will always recur,” Singh said in a conversation with Greg Watry.

Singh has also done research on witchcraft, story, and music. In a cross-cultural study of song carried out by the Natural History of Song Project, Samuel Mehr, Manvir Singh, and colleagues (2018) asked participants from sixty countries to listen to 14-second sound bytes of different types of music from unfamiliar cultures and to guess what type of song it was. One of the most interesting findings from this study is that certain types of song – dance music, lullabies, and healing music for example –  are recognizable by people without linguistic or cultural context. Listeners typically were able to identify these song forms correctly. The preliminary information for this project came from eHRAF World Cultures which helped to establish the universality of music. The researchers used the Probability Sample Files (PSF) to identify the most common types of songs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mehr, Samuel A., Manvir Singh, Dean Knox, Daniel M. Ketter, Daniel Pickens-Jones, Stephanie Atwood, Christopher Lucas et al. “Universality and diversity in human song.” Science 366, no. 6468 (2019): eaax0868.

Watry, Greg. “Shamanism Across Time: UC Davis Anthropologist Manvir Singh Explores Ancient and Modern Practices in New Book. Letters & Science. April 15, 2025. Accessed May 23, 2025: https://lettersandsciencemag.ucdavis.edu/self-society/shamanism-manvir-singh-book.