LEVYNA and HUME Lab invite you to a lecture and workshop
Attend an online lecture and workshop presented by evolutionary and cognitive anthropologist Dr. Manvir Singh.
LEVYNA and the HUME Lab invite you to a lecture and workshop by evolutionary and cognitive anthropologist Dr. Manvir Singh (Ph.D. Harvard University, 2020) based at the Institute of Advanced Study, Toulouse. You can learn more about the focus of his research on his website. His academic Twitter handle is @mnvrsngh. The most cited papers can be easily found via his Google Scholar profil.
Lecture: The social and psychological origins of religious super-attractors
9. 12., 16:00–17:00, online
This talk will present research on the nature and origins of three religious so-called super-attractors: shamanism, religious self-denial, and belief in supernatural punishment. These cultural practices have appeared in the vast majority of human societies, predate doctrinal religions, and persist even as doctrinal religious authorities seek to abolish them. Drawing on cultural evolutionary theory, cross-cultural comparative projects, and studies conducted among the Mentawai people in Indonesia, these practices will be characterized and hypotheses put forward as to why they recur. These hypotheses will then be tested against anthropological data.
Workshop: Building and analyzing large, cross-cultural databases to understand global patterns
10. 12., 10:00–12:00, online
For more than a century, fieldworkers have recorded the rich cultural products of human societies, including songs, stories, and visual art. New computational methods and much easier access to these collections allow researchers to study the universality and diversity of cultural behavior on a scale that has never been possible before. In this workshop, we will discuss building and analyzing large cross-cultural databases. We will focus on two projects: the Natural History of Song, a database of song structure and behavior, and Anansi, a database of myths, folktales, and legends. We will discuss how these projects were built, some of the techniques for analyzing them, and the problems that arise in analysis.
