Jorge Dias

Jorge Dias
Born(1907-07-31)31 July 1907
Porto, Portugal
Died5 February 1973(1973-02-05) (aged 65)
Lisbon, Portugal
Other namesAntónio Jorge Dias
Years active1945–1973
SpouseMargot Dias
Academic background
Alma materUniversity of Coimbra
University of Munich
ThesisVilarinho da Furna: Um Povo Autárquico na Serra da Amarela (1944)
Doctoral advisorGerhard Rohlfs
Other advisorsHans Rheinfelder
Otto Höfler
Herbert Cysarz
Karl Alexander von Müller
Academic work
Notable worksOs Macondes de Moçambique

António Jorge Dias (31 July 1907 – 5 February 1973) was a Portuguese ethnologist. He is mainly known for his ethnographic fieldwork in the late 1950s during Portuguese colonial times in Angola and Mozambique. Based on this, he and his wife, the self-trained ethnologist Margot Dias, published three ethnographic volumes titled Os Macondes de Moçambique about the Makonde people of northern Mozambique. Further, Dias was the first director of the Museu de Etnología do Ultramar that later became the Museu Nacional de Etnología in Lisbon.

Notwithstanding his general acceptance of assimilationist concepts of Portuguese colonial rule and having authored classified reports about attitudes towards this rule in the later colonial era of Mozambique, Dias has been called "the most important Portuguese anthropologist of the 20th century."