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The Luso-tropicalist ideas of Gilberto Freyre were thus promoted in Portugal, and Dias selectively drew inspiration from them, exalting miscegenation, although without emphasising the Moorish and Jewish legacies among the Portuguese. But that is not all. The views of Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda, influenced by Weber, that the Portuguese, as Catholics, did not give their colonisation a capitalist character, were also employed by Dias (J.M. Sobral, O Outro aqui tão Próximo..., 2007, p. 495). The contributions of cultural anthropology, with its relativist tendencies, coexisted in the author’s discourse with a nationalist, ethnocentric attitude that insisted on the civilisational superiority of Christianity and on the providential mission of the Portuguese, which fully aligned with the official political rhetoric of the Estado Novo .
This identification was crucial in explaining the radical shift brought about by Dias’ rise to prominence in the field of anthropology. Anthropobiology was the dominant knowledge in Portugal in the preceding period, which saw the passing of the last representative of the 19th-century ethnological tradition, Leite de Vasconcelos. Its main figure was Mendes Correia, a doctor by training, a defender of "white" superiority and hostile to miscegenation. However, racialist and racist approaches had become discredited due to their association with the Nazis and their allies. In the post-war era, which was also dominated by decolonisation following the independence of the Indian Union, race lost its value as an explanatory factor, with other factors, such as culture, being affirmed instead. It was within this political and intellectual context that cultural anthropology asserted itself with Dias, who would come to replace Mendes Correia as the leading figure, the man who gave him his first research position after his doctorate (J. M. Sobral, Representações Portuguesas e Brasileiras da Identidade Nacional ... [Portuguese and Brazilian Representations of National Identity] ).
