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.
[5][6] In 1944 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.
[2] Dias returned to Portugal in 1944 and was invited by António Mendes Corrêa to head the ethnography section of the Centre for Peninsular Ethnology Studies (CEEP), founded in 1945 at the University of Porto.
His research team included Margot Dias, Fernando Galhano, Ernesto Veiga de Oliveira and Benjamim Enes Pereira as collaborators.
Especially in Mozambique, ethnological research was promoted due to the colony's proximity to Tanzania, where numerous Makonde people live just across the border and the political developments in other neighbouring countries.
These classified documents describe the political and social situation surrounding the mission's research and have been found important to better understand the context in which the monographs on the Makonde and northern Mozambique were produced.
The museum included collections from mainland Portugal and the archipelagos of the Azores and Madeira, as well as from Africa, South America and Asia.
[...] The beauty and the sense of human dignity that natural space gives us, where man can move freely, are goods that are seriously threatened by this dizzying demographic growth.
The fourth volume on cultural knowledge, language, literature and games of the Makonde was written by their collaborator Manuel Viegas Guerreiro.
This was especially credited to Dias's understanding that an individual's behaviour is largely dictated by the social and cultural environment and not by biological factors such as racial traits.
[3] In 2015, the ethnologist Bjarne Rogan remarked Dias's "visions for the discipline and charisma, to which should be added his fluency in the main European languages.
"[20] In his introduction to the new edition of the first volume published in 1998, the Portuguese politician Rui Pereira commented on the colonial context of the mission: "In the course of the campaigns, Jorge Dias [seems] to have reversed the hierarchy of interests previously established by the sponsors of his research in northern Mozambique, i.e. he placed the eminently ethnological objectives in the foreground.
[8] On the other hand, as these classified documents describe the political and social situation surrounding the mission's research, they have been found important to better understand the context in which Dias's monographs on the Makonde and northern Mozambique were produced.