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THE TEAM
CONTACT
Jorge Dias' social background and education provided him with significant cultural and social capital. A s a polyglot, he mastered the most important scientific languages: French, English, and German. This not only allowed him access to international bibliography, but also made him a figure with whom self-taught ethnographers in Portugal or colonial administrators with an interest in colonial ethnography could not compete. These facts must be considered in order to understand the ease with which he moved within the European ethnology circles of the post-war period, which were focused on the preservation of popular arts and traditions. He was part of the International Commission on Popular Arts and Traditions (CIAP), the future SIEF (International Society for Ethnology and Folklore), and the first editorial board of the journal Ethnologia Europaea (Ernesto Veiga de Oliveira, Preface to Os Arados Portugueses ....[Portuguese Ploughs...]). These details are essential to understand his upward trajectory in the scientific field.
Almost all of Jorge Dias' research, dispersed across several books and over a hundred articles, unfolded in Portugal, but the most significant exception was the study he spearheaded in Mozambique in the second half of the 1950s. For the sake of organisation, his work can be grouped into five main sets. The first consists of essays dedicated to material culture, notably on housing, plough s, granaries, and, in general, the technology used in agriculture and the processing of agricultural products. There are the n the studies aimed at systematising the relationships and differences between disciplines such as ethnography, ethnology, folklore, and cultural anthropology, as well as those addressing methodology, along with textbooks (course books) intended for teaching and a small number of texts on Portuguese ethnograph ical themes and authors. The third group contains various synthes e s on what he referred to as the Portuguese "national character." In the fourth, there are articles on various themes, ranging from sexuality to the cult of the dead. Finally, the last set includes the studies in which he sought to characterise populations confined to specific areas —"communities"—which are quite distinct.
