Due to the occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union as part of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, her family moved to Nazi Germany in 1939.
Her father found a job as a professor and recommended her to study ethnology, which would become her major.
After she completed her doctorate, she became a translator for the German Red Cross before serving as a scientific assistant at the Museum am Rothenbaum from 1954 to 1955.
After that, she conducted field research in Turkey, where she lived with a family of nomads and was a visiting professor in Istanbul in 1970.
From 1981 to 2001, she was on the selection committee of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and chaired the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie [de] from 1985 to 1989.