In the 1960s he also cultivated interdepartmental studies at the University of Lisbon's Faculty of Arts and Literature, becoming closely acquainted and working with names like Ruben Andersen Leitão (1920-1975), Maria de Lourdes Belchior (1923-1999) and Luís Lindley Cintra (1925-1991). In 1966 he was chair of General Ethnology and Regional Ethnology at the Faculty of Arts and Literature, and definitively left secondary school teaching. In 1969 he defended, at the same school, his doctoral dissertation in Ethnology on the 'Khú Bushmen of Angola. Ethnographic study, with a score of 19.

The following year he completed the exams for the position of Extraordinary Professor of Ethnology, and in 1971 he took over the position of full professor. In 1973 he was responsible for the creation, within the Centre for Geographical Studies of the National Institute of Scientific Research, of the "Recolha e Estudo de Literatura Popular" (Collection and Study of Popular Literature) line of research, constituting an extended team of collaborators, including scholars such as Lindley Cintra, Maria Aliete Galhoz (born 1929), Paul Caratão Soromenho (1912-1985), Antonio Machado Guerreiro (1919-2007) and Michel Giacometti (1929-1990). With this team he coordinated an important project collecting oral and musical traditions in Portugal.

He was also awarded the Prémio Ocidente in 1973. Primarily from ethnological and anthropological perspectives, he structured an important contribution to contemporary Portuguese historiography, reflecting on the issue of Jewish and Islamic communities in the history of Portugal (Dicionário de História de Portugal, ‘Dictionary of Portuguese History’, 1965) and also working on the history of the Age of Discovery, particularly on the approximation to new cultures, which resulted in the publication of works such as Carta a El-Rei Dom Manuel sobre o achamento do Brasil, (Letter to King Dom Manuel on the discovery of Brazil) in 1974 or Carta do Achamento das Antilhas 15 de Fevereiro – 14 de Março de 1493, (Letter on the Discovery of the West Indies, 15 February) in 1992.

In 1974 he cooperated on the restructuring of the Faculty of Arts and Literature at the University of Lisbon motivated by the Carnation Revolution, taking a leading role in initiatives such as the creation of the non-degree course in Anthropology and of the 'Student Civic Service', under which dozens of young university students actively participated in the national collection of ethnographic sources (which would later be integrated into the current Labour Museum in Setúbal). During this period he was also director of the Dr. Leite de Vasconcelos Ethnological Museum and promoted the 'Work and Culture Plan', structured on the systematisation of various components of popular culture, with a special regard for orality, since he argued that the spoken word "is the miracle of the intelligence that governs the world, the divine communication between God and men, and among themselves. It is order in chaos, the world made whole, man made God" (Para a História da Literatura Portuguesa, ‘For the History of Portuguese Literature, 1978, 12).

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