Hello, I am Gonçalo D. SANTOS.

I was born in Coimbra. My first name is Portuguese and is pronounced Gon-sah-loo. I am a social-cultural anthropologist interested in questions of societal transformation. I studied Chinese in the cities of Macau and Guangzhou, and I started to develop ethnographic research in China in the late 1990s. In the last two decades, I lived and worked in China for a total period of more than 10 years. Much of my research has focused on the region of South China, but I have also developed comparative field research projects in other parts of China as well as in Southeast Asia. My work explores new approaches to questions of modernity, moral subjectivity, and socio-technical transformation in times of increasing social inequalities and increasing environmental uncertainties.

RECENT INTERVIEWS
Podcast: China Rural: Tradições, Tecnocracia e Etnografia Longitudinal  (Rural China: Traditions, Technocracy, and Longitudinal Ethnography), Interview with Anthropologist / Sinologist Gonçalo D. Santos, Universo Generalista, Dec 6th 2022
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Journal Article: “Translating STS in China. Disciplinary Struggles and Future Prospects.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 9 (1), Forthcoming, April 2023  (with J. L. Xing and N. Sharif)

Essay: “Ai Weiwei no Antropoceno.” Público, March 5th 2023

Monograph: Chinese Village Life Today (Univ. of Washington Press, Fall 2021)
RECENT EVENTS

I was trained in anthropology and science studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon, and the University of CoimbraI am currently a Professor of Social-Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Coimbra. I am also a Senior Researcher at CIAS – Research Centre for Anthropology and Health, University of Coimbra, where I coordinate the Research Cluster “Technoscience, Society, and Environment”. Prior to returning to Coimbra in 2020, I held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and the University of Hong Kong. I am the founder and the director of the International Research Network Sci-Tech Asia committed to promoting the growth of science, technology, and society studies in Asia and around the world.

Much of my research has focused on the radical transformations faced by Chinese society in the last four decades under the increasing influence of global capitalist forces and global technocratic structures of governance. My latest book—entitled Chinese Village Life Today. Building Families in an Age of Transition (Univ. of Washington Press, 2021)—paints a richly detailed portrait of recent changes shaping the conduct of everyday life in Chinese rural communities. It is based on more than twenty years of ethnographic field research with a rural community in South China, following the movements of villagers across rural-urban boundaries. The book explores the increasing power of technoscientific and technocratic frameworks of governance in rural China, showing how these powerful forces are shaping the configuration of daily village life, from marriage, childbirth, and childcare to popular religion, personal hygiene, and public sanitation. The book explores the making of contemporary China from the perspective of marginal rural populations, highlighting the moral agency of these populations and their intimate choices as they engage with larger national and global forces of modernization.

I am the co-editor of two books that explore questions of family change and societal transformation. These two books are widely used in courses on contemporary China and includeTransforming Patriarchy (University of Washington Press, 2017, co-edited with S. Harrell) and Chinese Kinship (Routledge, 2009, co-edited with S. Brandtstadter). Beyond China, I am interested in comparative questions, and I have co-edited two journal special issues proposing innovative inter-Asian comparative approaches: one focusing on love, marriage, and intimate citizenship in China and India (Modern Asian Studies, 2016), the other on the history of childbirth medicalization in China and Japan (Technology and Culture, 2020). My research highlights the diversity of frameworks of knowledge, technology, and morality shaping the fabric of everyday life in diverse Asian contexts, and this focus on multiple forms of knowing, evaluating, and doing things is linked to my training in science studies and its critique of universal reason. My first book—entitled A Escola de Antropologia de Coimbra (The Anthropological School of Coimbra) (Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2005)—illustrates my engagement with science studies, proposing a critical account of the history of the relations between race, science and society in Portugal from the late 19th century until the mid- 20th century.

My research has received awards and grants from major institutions such as the American Council of Learned Societies, the British Academy, the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. I am in the editorial board of the following journals: Antropologia PortuguesaWorldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, and Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies. In 2018-2019, I was awarded a Visiting Scholar Fellowship from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin to develop a research project on the medicalization of birth in contemporary China. In 2019-2021, I was invited by the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University to join a Research Group on Culture and Society that hosts regular workshops on questions of moral transformation in contemporary China. In 2021-2022, I curated the international virtual colloquium, “Pluralizing the Anthropocene. Reenvisioning the Future of the Planet in the 21st Century”, supported by Fundação Serralves.

PLURALIZING THE ANTHROPOCENE BANNER