He spent forty years studying tribal cultures in Northeast India, in the central region of what is now the state of Telangana and in Nepal.

[3][1] After his thesis, von Fürer-Haimendorf moved to London in order to establish contact with the main anthropologists of his time, such as Bronislaw Malinowski.

From then onwards, von Fürer-Haimendorf would insist that it was of the utmost importance for an ethnologist or ethnographer to learn well the language of the people who were the subject of the fieldwork in order to be competent in his or her studies.

At the time he only made a brief visit to Europe and returned to India, so that at the outbreak of World War II he found himself in British territory holding a Third Reich passport.

[6] He also shot a total of over 100 hours of 16 mm documentary films, giving a glimpse on the way of life of certain little-known cultures that were poised to change irreversibly.