19 Facts About Jorge Dias

Jorge Dias is mainly known for his ethnographic fieldwork in the late 1950s during Portuguese colonial times in Angola and Mozambique.

Jorge Dias was born in Porto in 1907 and spent most of his youth there.

Jorge Dias's parents had a farm near Guimaraes, where Dias grew up experiencing Portuguese rural life.

Jorge Dias taught at the University of Rostock from 1938 to 1939, the University of Munich from 1939 to 1942, and the University of Berlin from 1942 to 1944.

In 1944 Jorge Dias obtained his doctorate from the University of Munich with a thesis in European ethnology based on his research on the Portuguese town Vilarinho da Furna.

Jorge Dias returned to Portugal in 1944 and was invited by Antonio Mendes Correa to head the ethnography section of the Centre for Peninsular Ethnology Studies, founded in 1945 at the University of Porto.

Jorge Dias directed this department from 1947 until 1959 and became director of the CEEP from 1960 onwards.

Jorge Dias became a member of the International Commission for Ethnology and Folklore, of which he was general secretary from 1954 to 1957.

From 1952 to 1956, Jorge Dias was Professor of Ethnology at the University of Coimbra, after which he moved on to the University of Lisbon.

In 1957, Jorge Dias received a commission from the Portuguese government to investigate indigenous people of Portuguese colonies in Africa: the Mission for the Study of Ethnic Minorities in Portuguese Overseas Territories, whose purpose was to study the ethnic minorities of Portuguese overseas territories and their attitude towards Portuguese colonial rule.

In 1961, Margot Jorge Dias returned to Mozambique on her own and for the last time.

In 1962, Jorge Dias started the Centre for Cultural Anthropology Studies, which he then directed.

Jorge Dias set up and directed this new museum until the time of his death in 1973.

Towards the end of his life, Jorge Dias became pessimistic about the endangered relationship of nature and human demographic growth:.

Jorge Dias died in 1973 at age 65 and was survived by his wife Margot Dias, who died in 2001 at the age of 93.

Jorge Dias authored numerous articles and books of ethnology and cultural anthropology.

Jorge Dias was posthumously decorated as Commander of the Military Order of Saint James of the Sword and with the Grand Cross of the Order of Prince Henry the Navigator.

From an early stage, Jorge Dias' work was influenced by German-born US-American anthropologist Franz Boas.

The fact that Jorge Dias had both authored his ethnological reports as well as unpublished classified reports about political developments in Mozambique was later criticised by historians who accused Jorge Dias's mission of collaboration with the political regime of the time and a general acceptance of the assimilationist concept of Lusotropicalism.