How do cultural traits compare across human societies? Do genuine cultural universals exist? In this talk, I will share results from two large-scale comparative projects — the Natural History of Song (NHS) and Anansi — that investigate global patterns in music and storytelling, respectively. For NHS, I will present evidence of form-function regularities in song and of behavioral contexts that appear universally associated with music (e.g., healing, dance, lullaby). For Anansi, I will preview findings on how modern Western stories diverge from narratives told around the world and throughout history, and on the behavioral contexts in which people have told stories across cultures. Finally, I will show how long-term fieldwork with a single society — in this case, Northern Aché foragers in Paraguay — can complicate conclusions drawn from comparative projects, illustrating the value of combining large-scale comparative research with fine-grained ethnographic research.

Manvir Singh is an assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Anthropology. He directs the UC Davis Integrative Anthropology Lab, which combines evolutionary, cognitive, and sociocultural methods and theory to understand the nature and origins of human behavior. Since 2014, he has worked with Mentawai communities on Siberut Island, Indonesia. Singh is also a contributing writer at The New Yorker.

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