Biography

Pedro Antunes is a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, where he works in the areas of anthropology of migration and critical heritage studies, with an interest in processes of diasporism, material culture, and histories of customary systems and common heritage. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from Iscte-IUL (2021) and was a Guest Lecturer at NOVA University Lisbon between 2021 and 2025. He is co-coordinator of the IN2PAST Doctoral School and the Working Group for Doctoral Training at the same laboratory.

His current research explores the digital revitalisation of Maghrebi Jewish-Muslim culture in diasporic contexts, as part of the project “eSefarad: modalities and practices of digital patrimonialization of the Sephardic cultural legacy in Mediterranean contexts” (CRIA, FCT, 2022–2025). He has studied the trajectories of artefacts from the collections of the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée and the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, linking them to emerging digital practices in communities that speak Judezmo and Heketía. This work was developed as a visiting researcher at the Institut d’ethnologie méditerranéenne, européenne et comparative (2023). In parallel, he maintains a line of research on customary systems and micro-histories of solidarity, in continuity with his thesis Depois da Morte. O Restauro Imaterial da Encomendação das Almas [After death: the immaterial restoration of the commendation of souls] (2021). In common, these lines question modes of critical reconfiguration of popular cultures in postcolonial contexts, between memory, resistance and shared futurity.

Research fields

• Anthropology of migration and diasporism
• Critical studies of heritage and material culture
• Digital practices for language revitalisation
• Customary systems and popular cultures

Selected publications

• Antunes, Pedro, “Modos de figuração patrimoniais: práticas de animismo popular no ciclo da Páscoa em Idanha-a-Nova,” in Patrimônios culturais em lugares de língua portuguesa, organised by Yussef Campos and Paulo Peixoto, 211-237. Goiânia: Cegraf UFG, 2024. [link] 🔓
• Antunes, Pedro. “‘Arte-etnografia’, um Campo Experimental: Recensão crítica de uma epistemologia para as ‘visões expandidas’ de Arnd Schneider,” Aniki: Revista Portuguesa da Imagem em Movimento 9 (2022): 319-327. [link] 🔓
• Antunes, Pedro. “ Voicing Souls. Embodying Uncertainty in a Portuguese Borderland Village,” Ethnologia Europaea 50 (2020): 73-88. [link] 🔓
• Antunes, Pedro, “The “Commendation of Souls”: Body and the Senses,” in Expressions of Religion: Ethnography, Performance and the Senses, edited by Eugenia Roussou, Clara Saraiva and István Povedák, 59-88. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2019. [link]

Main projects

• Coordinator of the project ‘eSefarad: modalities and practices of digital patrimonialization of the Sephardic cultural legacy in Mediterranean contexts‘ — Hosted and funded by CRIA, with funds from the Foundation for Science and Technology. 2022-2025 [link]
• ‘Depois da morte: o restauro imaterial da encomendação das almas’ [After death: the immaterial restoration of the commendation of souls] — Individual PhD project supervised by João Leal (CRIA — NOVA FCSH) and funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (PD/BD/113912/2015)