He first conducted fieldwork among the Daribi of Karimui, in the Simbu Province of Papua New Guinea, as well as the Usen Barok of New Ireland.
He was influential in creating the genre known as the New Melanesian Ethnography, which emphasizes creativity and innovation in cultures and how they understand the world.
His book The Invention of Culture (1975; 1981) is considered a classic of ethnography and theory, and has been translated into Japanese, Portuguese, Italian and French.
His concepts of symbolic obviation, figure-ground reversal, analogic kinship, holography and fractality of personhood have been critical in the development of anthropological theory in the last few decades.
Anthropologists influenced by Wagner include Marilyn Strathern, Jadran Mimica, James Weiner, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.