[1][2][3] Vitebsky studied his undergraduate degree in Classics with Modern and Medieval Languages at King's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1971.
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.
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.
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.