Piers Vitebsky is head of Anthropology and Russian Northern Studies Department at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. He studied ancient languages before becoming an anthropologist and has carried out fieldwork among shamans and shifting cultivators in tribal India since 1975 and among nomadic reindeer herders in the Siberian Arctic since 1988.

His book THE REINDEER PEOPLE: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) won the Kiriyama Prize in 2006, and Honorable Mention for the Victor Turner Prize.

He is also the author of the forthcoming LOVING AND FORGETTING: Dialogues with the Dead in Tribal India, to be published by University of Chicago Press.