Overview

As Katherine Verdery observes, ""There's nothing like reading your secret police file to make you wonder who you really are."" In 1973 Verdery began her doctoral fieldwork in the Transylvanian region of Romania, ruled at the time by communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. She returned several times over the next twenty-five years, during which time the secret police-the Securitate-compiled a massive surveillance file on her. Reading through its 2,781 pages, she learned that she was ""actually"" a spy, a CIA agent, a Hungarian agitator, and a friend of dissidents: in short, an enemy of Romania. In My Life as a Spy she analyzes her file alongside her original field notes and conversations with Securitate officers. Verdery also talks with some of the informers who were close friends, learning the complex circumstances that led them to report on her, and considers how fieldwork and spying can be easily confused. Part memoir, part detective story, part anthropological analysis, My Life as a Spy offers a personal account of how government surveillance worked during the Cold War and how Verdery experienced living under it.

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9780822370666

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Reviews

This fascinating and important book should be compulsory reading for all anthropologists and oral historians. There is nothing quite like it. -- Sheila Fitzpatrick, author of * A Spy in the Archives: A Memoir of Cold War Russia * With fearless curiosity and a broken heart, Katherine Verdery takes us on a fraught journey into her secret police files, addressing issues of trust and betrayal in fieldwork with such vulnerability you want to hold her hand. A haunting and original mix of auto-ethnography and history, this book is certain to become a classic in anthropology. -- Ruth Behar, author of * Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in between Journeys *

With fearless curiosity and a broken heart, Katherine Verdery takes us on a fraught journey into her secret police files, addressing issues of trust and betrayal in fieldwork with such vulnerability you want to hold her hand. A haunting and original mix of auto-ethnography and history, this book is certain to become a classic in anthropology. --Ruth Behar, author of Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in between Journeys This fascinating and important book should be compulsory reading for all anthropologists and oral historians. There is nothing quite like it. --Sheila Fitzpatrick, author of A Spy in the Archives: A Memoir of Cold War Russia

Coming from such a distinguished academic, Verdery's brutally honest description of herself, including as a naive and careless young scholar, is stunning. Few books reflect so frankly and so powerfully on the nature and complications of an academic career. * Foreign Affairs * Fascinating, thoughtful and occasionally riveting. -- James Ryerson * New York Times Book Review * A memoir with the exciting elements of an espionage thriller. . . . This work of anthropological intrigue shows the author's academic coming-of-age. -- Karl Helicher * Foreword *

Fascinating, thoughtful and occasionally riveting. -- James Ryerson * New York Times Book Review * A memoir with the exciting elements of an espionage thriller. . . . This work of anthropological intrigue shows the author's academic coming-of-age. -- Karl Helicher * Foreword *

Author Information

Katherine Verdery is Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author of numerous books, including The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania and Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania's Secret Police.

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