Hello, I am Gonçalo D. SANTOS.
I am a social-cultural anthropologist specialised in questions of development and social transformation, with extensive experience of ethnographic and collaborative research in rural and urban areas in China. I studied Chinese in the cities of Macau and Guangzhou and started developing ethnographic research on a regular basis in China from the late 1990s onwards. I have also strong ethnographic research interests in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia and Portugal. My work explores new critical approaches to questions of modernity, development, and social transformation in times of increasing social inequalities and increasing environmental hazards and uncertainties. I am strongly committed to grounded theoretical approaches that bring together the fields of anthropology, Asian studies, and science and technology studies.
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
Podcast: S01 E14 – TechnoViews #14. ‘Chinese Village Life Today’ | Gonçalo Santos (University of Coimbra), June 1st 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
12 March 2021
Sci-Tech Asia Virtual Seminar: Histories of Childbirth Medicalization in East Asia: An Intercultural Conversation
29 Jan 2021
Virtual Colloquium, Georgetown University: China, Unseen: Solving Problems in the New Era.” Research Group Culture and Society, U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues, Georgetown University
21-24 July 2020
EASA Conference Roundtable: “Shifting Horizons: Anthropology and STS in the 21st Century.” 16th EASA Biennial Conference EASA2020: New Anthropological Horizons in and beyond Europe, Lisbon Virtual Conference
19 June 2020
Virtual Symposium, University of Johannesburg: “COVID-19, Technoscience, and Biosecurity in the 21st Century,” Johannesburg Institute for Advance Study“
I undertook my doctoral studies in anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon. I am currently an Assistant Professor of Social-Cultural Anthropology at the University of Coimbra. I am also a Full Researcher at CIAS – Research Centre for Anthropology and Health, University of Coimbra, where I coordinate the Research Cluster “Technoscience, Society, and Environment,” committed to promoting critical multi-disciplinary research on contemporary experiences of climatic breakdown and environmental degradation, with a special focus on the experiences of subaltern (human and non-human) communities and their struggles of environmental resilience, adaptation, and justice. Prior to joining the University of Coimbra in 2020, I held professorial and research positions at the London School of Economics, 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 social studies of science and technology in Asia and around the world. I am also a member of the Research Group on Culture and Society of the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University.
Much of my research on China has focused on the last decades of radical transformations under the increasing influence of powerful forces of development and globalization. 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 technocratic forces of development 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 include: Transforming 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 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 China and other Asian contexts, and this focus on multiple forms of knowing and doing things is linked to my interest in science studies and critical STS scholarship. My first book – entitled A Escola de Antropologia de Coimbra (The Anthropological School of Coimbra) (Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2005) – illustrates my engagement with the field of STS. In this book, I focus on the little-known history of the discipline of Anthropology in Portugal, drawing on the notion of “world anthropologies” to make the case that a truly global history of the discipline needs to pay more attention to forms of anthropological knowledge that are produced outside the dominant centres of anthropological production.
My research has been awarded over 10 grants as PI or Co-PI from major national and international funding institutions, including the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, Hong Kong Research Grants Council, American Council of Learned Societies and British Academy. I am in the editorial board of a number of distinguished journals, including Antropologia Portuguesa, Worldwide 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 2021-2022, I curated the international colloquium, “Pluralizing the Anthropocene. Reenvisioning the Future of the Planet in the 21st Century”, supported by Fundação Serralves. I am also very active as a podcaster and science communicator.