Born in northern Portugal, Pina-Cabral was brought up in Portuguese Mozambique, and studied in South Africa (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg).
He was co-founder of the Anthropology Departments at the Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa (Lisbon) and at the Faculty of Sciences & Technology of the University of Coimbra; founding President of the Portuguese Association of Anthropology (1988–91); founding member, later Secretary (1994–96) and, later still, President of the European Association of Social Anthropology (2003–04); and he was founder and Rector of the Universidade Atlântica (1996–97).
Pina-Cabral was Malinowski Memorial Lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK), 1992; Distinguished Speaker at the Society for the Anthropology of Europe of the American Anthropological Association, 1992; Stirling Memorial Lecturer at the University of Kent (UK), 2003; Oração de Sapiência, University of Lisbon, 1999; and Inaugural Lecturer for the Program of Postgraduation in Social Anthropology, of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil, 2006.
Pina-Cabral is Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland; Honorary Member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and Correspondent Member of the Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Politicas (Spain).
Pina-Cabral's thematic interests are: the relation between symbolic thought and social power; family and kinship in a comparative perspective; ethnicity in colonial and post-colonial contexts.