He was a co-founder of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and had worked at various editorial positions in a few anthropological journals.
During his early childhood years, he lived in village in Hesse where he came in touch with refugees and experienced the "social structures" of Germany's countryside areas.
[2] For his doctorate, he presented a monographic dissertation titled Pariagruppen des Pandschab (Pariah Groups of Punjab).
[2] In the 1970s, he also performed his career's second field study on the role of the Vedic Brahmins in Jagannath Temple at Puri in Odisha, India.
[5] Since the 1980s, central India's Adivasi people had been the main focus of his field research, specially the study of their kinship, rituals, and religion.
[4] Since 1990, he was a member of the editorial staff of the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie for its South Asia and Symbolic Classification subject.
From 1993 to 1995, he along with Bernhard Hänsel, served as the co-editor for the publications of the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte.
[3] Between 1996 and 2006, he headed the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-funded Schwerpunktprogramm Orissa[note 4] at the Institute of Ethnology of the Free University of Berlin under which a number of long-term research projects were executed in the state.
[4] Peter Berger noted that Pfeffer compared "worldviews and social structures" of the American, Australian and Central Indian autochthonous peoples.
According to Berger, Pfeffer's "most important contribution lies in his comparative endeavor, as he worked out the general patterns of social structure and ideology that are shared by the various Central Indian indigenous peoples and at the same time constitute different distinctive cultural sub-complexes.