Life under Surveillance: An American in Communist Romania

When Katherine Verdery arrived in Romania in 1973 to research ethnic identity - later she also focused on property and collectivisation - for her anthropology doctorate she was told she might be under surveillance by the country’s infamous Securitate, the Communist political police.

But she says she never thought that her file would include 11 volumes and that years later, in 2010, she would read it page by page and find out that many of her friends had written reports on her.

Currently a distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Verdery wrote a book based on her Securitate file in an attempt to come to terms with the different story that the 11 volumes told about her stay in Romania.

‘My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File’ was published in July in English and in Romanian a month later. The book, she says, is partly a memoir and partly an ethnographic study.