Manvir Singh

Manvir Singh (born 1990) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and a contributing writer for The New Yorker.

Education and early career Singh holds a Ph.D. in Human Evolutionary Biology (2020) from Harvard University. During his doctoral studies, he shifted focus toward anthropology following being influenced by research on cross-cultural human behaviors.

Singh attended Rutgers Preparatory School, in Somerset, New Jersey, and holds a bachelor's in human biology from Brown University, where his studies focused on animal behavior, ecology, and evolution, along with a thesis on burying beetles.

Research

Shamanism and religion: Singh explores shamanism as a "cognitive technology" that humans repeatedly redevelop to manage life's uncertainties, such as illness or weather. He argues that shamanic practices reflect universal aspects of human psychology and persist even in modern contexts, such as in the practices of Silicon Valley CEOs.

Music and storytelling: Singh studies the cross-cultural patterns of music (e.g., lullabies and dance music) and narrative structures to identify present universal perceptual phenomena.

Psychedelics: Singh investigates the historical and traditional use of psychedelics, particularly their role in shamanic rituals and their impact on belief systems.

Publications

Books

Received the 2025 Carol R. Ember Book Prize, awarded by the Society for Anthropological Sciences. The prize recognizes work that combines ethnography with cross-cultural analysis and cognitive science. Zoostalgia (2012)

Selected academic publications

Popular essays and articles

Singh, Manvir, "Read the Label: How psychiatric diagnoses create identities", The New Yorker, 13 May 2024, pp. 20-24.

Awards and honors New Investigator Award (2021): Awarded by the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) for outstanding research by early-career scholars.

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2015–2019): A competitive award supporting his doctoral research at Harvard University.