Shamanism, witchcraft, origin myths, property rights, sharing norms, lullabies, dance music, and gods have appeared in human societies everywhere, from nomadic hunter-gatherer bands to complex, industrial, mega-urbanized states. My research program aims to explain why societies develop complex, recurrent traditions such as these. Focusing on canonical puzzles from law, religion, and art, I ask three questions:

 

Q1. How do certain traditions compare across societies? Are there procedures of justice that follow conflict across human societies? Do religions around the world, extending from those of Australian hunter-gatherers to renewal Pentecostalism, share basic beliefs or practices? What are the universal features of music? To answer these questions, I conduct comparative work, such as by collecting and analyzing cross-cultural datasets (e.g., Singh, 2018; Singh, 2021; Mehr & Singh et al., 2018; Mehr, Singh et al., 2019).

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Q2. What are the processes by which these near-universals develop? From Q1, we might conclude that human societies recurrently exhibit some practice like shamanism or laws against killing. My research investigates why. How do human psychology, sociality, and cultural evolution interact to sculpt these shared traditions? To answer this question, I integrate insights from across the behavioral sciences, developing accounts to explain the patterns in practices and beliefs (e.g., shamanism: Singh, 2018; witchcraft and sorcery: Singh, 2021; rules: Singh et al., 2017).,

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Q3. How well do these accounts explain cultural realities? I study these social and culture practices through fieldwork with the Mentawai people of Siberut Island, Indonesia. The field studies serve two purposes. First, they aim to answer as-of-yet unanswered questions about the design of cultural practices. For instance, in a recent study of a punitive crocodile spirit, I challenged the common view that the 'small gods' of animist traditions lack moral concerns (Singh et al., 2021). Second, field studies provide a venue to test explanations for why near-universals develop. For example, an ongoing examination of prohibitions on shamans tests among several hypotheses for why religious self-denial exists, including one proposed in my theory of shamanism (Singh & Henrich, 2020).

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