British anthropologist
Piers Vitebsky is an anthropologist who was Head of Anthropology and Russian Northern Studies and Assistant Director of Research at the Scott Polar Research Institute of the University of Cambridge in England.
Education.
Vitebsky studied his undergraduate degree in Classics with Modern and Medieval Languages at King's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1971. He then went on to take a diploma in Social Anthropology at Oxford University. In the late seventies he was an affiliated student at the Delhi School of Economics. Eventually he completed his PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 1982.
Career.
Since the 1980s, Vitebsky has carried out long-term fieldwork among with the Evens of Siberia, and among shamans and shifting cultivators in tribal India and Sri Lanka. In the Russian Arctic, he was the first westerner since the Revolution to live long-term with an indigenous community. Only after working for several months at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in Leningrad was he allowed to fly out to Yakutsk in 1988.
From 1986 to 2016, Vitebsky was Head of Anthropology and Russian Northern Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute of the University of Cambridge. Until his retirement he was Assistant Director of Research at the institute. His other appointments include Professor II at the University of Tromsø in Norway, Honorary Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), and Honorary Professor at the North-Eastern Federal University in the Russian Far East.
His current focus is on reindeer herders' perceptions of and responses to climate change.
Media work.
Vitebsky's numerous documentary film collaborations include 'Arctic aviators' (National Geographic) and 'Flightpaths to the gods' (BBC2, on the Nazca lines in Peru), and 'Siberia: after the shaman' (Channel 4), which won first prize at the Film Festival of the European Foundation for the Environment and was screened at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York City.
Awards.
Vitebsky has won the Gilchrist Expedition Award from the Royal Geographical Society. In 2006 he won the Kiriyama Prize for non-fiction. He was also runner up for the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing in 2007 - awarded annually by Society for Humanistic Anthropology, American Anthropological Association.
References.
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