Dr Piers Vitebsky

Piers Vitebsky studied ancient languages before becoming a social anthropologist specialising in the religions and ecologies of indigenous peoples of Siberia and Tribal India.  In Cambridge he is Emeritus Head of Anthropology and Russian Northern Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute, and chairs the MIASU Management Committee.  He is also Honorary Professor at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk and a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia).  His books include Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia (2005); Shamanism: Voyages of the Soul, Trance, Ecstasy and Healing from Siberia to the Amazon (1995); Dialogues with the Dead: the Discussion of Mortality among the Sora of Eastern India (1993); and Living without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos (2017).  He has been a consultant on many documentary films and his current projects include a training programme in academic writing for indigenous Siberian scholars and a dictionary with corpus of texts in the Sora language.

Recent book: Living without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo8005668.html