Gonçalo Santos is a specialist in the anthropology of China. His research focuses primarily on kinship, family and relatedness. His major fieldwork research was conducted between 1999 and 2001 in a Cantonese-speaking ‘single-surname village’ in Northern Guangdong, South China. Inspired by recent developments in kinship studies, this doctoral research called for a return to the ‘old’ topic of ‘lineage-village organization’ in rural South China considering the dramatic transformations occurred in Chinese society during the last decades.
Dr. Santos continues to undertake field research in that village, but he has also expanded his fieldwork experience to other regions of rural China as well as to the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi (Toraja highlands). His most recent research and publications focus on topics as diverse as modernity, fertility and social change; youth, friendship and ritual kinship; farming, technology and social organization. His other major research interest is childhood and the relation between culture and cognition. He is currently preparing a new research project on rural South China that will focus on the ways village children come to make sense of the normative kinship ideas of patrilineal inheritance invoked by the adults.

A village in Northern Guangdong (South China)

Selected publications:

2009 (forthcoming). “Rice Intimacies: Reflections on the ‘house’ in Upland Sulawesi and rural South China.” Archiv für Völkerkunde, Special Issue “Living in Memory: Houses, history and social/natural environment in Southeast Asia". (article co-authored with A. Donzelli)

2008. Chinese Kinship. Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives. London & New York: Routledge. (volume co-edited with S. Brandtstädter)

2008. "On ‘same-year siblings’ in rural South China". Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 14 (3): 535-553.

2006. Zhongguo fuxi zongzu yu yinger de renzhi (Chinese patriliny and infant cognition). Zhongguo Yanjiu (China Study), No. 3, Special Issue on Cognitive Anthropology.

2006. “The Anthropology of Chinese Kinship. A Critical Overview“. European Journal of East Asian Studies, 5 (2): 275-333.

2006. “Os ‘camponeses’ e o ‘imperador’. Reflexões etnográficas sobre orizicultura intensiva e estratificação social no Sudeste da China.” Etnográfica 10 (1): 40-71.