He completed his university studies in Budapest at the Department of Ethnography of the Eötvös Loránd University, receiving a doctorate in 1981 and a candidate’s degree in 1995. He habilitated at the University of Pécs, then in 2010, he became a doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA). Between 1977 and 1984 he was working as curator at the Oceania Collection at the Museum of Ethnography, Budapest. He has been an employee of the Institute of Ethnography of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) since 1984 and is currently a scientific advisor. Since 1993, he has been a lecturer at the Department of Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Pécs (he was the head of the department for six years) and the head of the Doctoral Program in Ethnography-Cultural Anthropology.

Between 1985 and 1989, and then in 2007, he did fieldwork for a total of one and a half and then half a year among the Central Vietnamese Bruk. He has also conducted shorter and longer research in Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya, South Korea, South China, and Laos.

One of the invited speakers on the topic of In the Field at the conference.