The co-convenors of the Anthropology of Surveillance Network (ANSUR), Deniz Yonucu, Vita Peacock and Rune Steenberg, spoke with Katherine Verdery about her book My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File (2018, Duke University Press) and doing ethnographic research under surveillance. The interview was originally published as part of ANSUR’s podcast series #UnderSurveillance. The podcast and interview transcript are below, courtesy of ANSUR.

Deniz Yonucu: Anthropologists are already familiar with the connection between your own personal experiences of surveillance and your academic interest in surveillance. But just to provide a bit of a background here, would you please remind us, how did you decide to write on surveillance?

Katherine Verdery:  I’ve been doing research in Romania for many years. I did my first research for my dissertation starting in 1974, and I published a number of other books on various topics: land, property restitution, that was my best book, I think called The Vanishing Hectare, and a bunch of other things. But I’ve continued to go back to the same community in which I did my first fieldwork starting in 1974. And so I spent, I figured out, approximately seven and a half years in Romania, if you put all my trips together. And that’s given the secret police quite a lot to work with. They didn’t record me or write me up so much after 1989, but there was some. But from 1974 on, they were interested in me, in part because, as you know from reading my book, I had taken a motorbike up to the area where I was supposed to be doing my work, and I was riding around trying to find it and drove right into an area that had been marked with a sign saying ‘Entry prohibited to foreigners’. I hadn’t seen the sign, and I think it was because I was riding into the sunset and so I couldn’t see a thing. I hadn’t been there long enough to know what they looked like, these signs saying, ‘Entry prohibited’. So I probably rode right under it and got stopped by a policeman.  Very shortly after a military officer who was stationed in that area got onto me, probably from the local police. And I appear in reports of the secret police right from the outset of my research. So the secret police files are a very valuable research tool for me because they cover my entire research period in socialist Romania.

But I didn’t find out about this until after 1989, when the Romanian government set up this organization called, The National Council for The Study Of The Securitate Archive. Securitate being the secret police. A friend of mine in Romania said, ‘Why don’t you apply to see your file?’ My first reaction was: ‘I don’t think I’d want to see it’. But eventually this friend of mine talked me into getting into requesting it so that I could see what it consisted of. When I went in response to their notes saying that they had my file, I went into the office of this big institution that had been created for people to consult their files. And the pile stood about this high on the desk. And I thought, ‘Oh, okay, this looks like quite a lot more than I had hoped’. It was over 2000 pages, I believe. So then the question for me was, did I really want to read this thing? At the moment I had finished my other project, whatever I was doing, and didn’t have anything immediately pending. So I said, ‘Well, okay, so why don’t I take a look at it?’ And I got completely caught up in reading it, caught up with both fascination and horror. I read it all the way through, and requested, as we were allowed to do, that it be Xeroxed for me. I had to go buy a suitcase to take home all the pages. Because it was so big. After I finished whatever other book I’d been finishing, I said, ‘Okay, these boxes have been sitting in the corner of my office for a while and it’s time for me to take a look at them.’

So I sat down and started to read them with rising horror, as I saw what incredible detail and how many people they had used to write up these reports, and following me in all sorts of places. I decided, after sort of trying to get my breath back after my first read, that I would try to use this as a way of writing the memoirs of my time in Romania through the eyes of the police as seen in this file. And that was how I got the idea for it. It just happened to fall into a space in my life when I wasn’t starting a new project of any kind. I was sort of casting about for something to do. And this presented itself. In the process of reading the book, the material and thinking about how to use it and so on, I started reading some literature on surveillance. I had a colleague at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, Setha Low, who was interested in surveillance. She invited me to a conference that she was putting together on this subject. I had to write a paper for that. And bit by bit, I began acquiring more familiarity with other literature on this topic. Although I didn’t sit down and do a complete literature search, which is what I would usually do for a new project. I was reading it very egotistically: What can I use in this for myself on this new book? And so bit by bit I put it together. Then I went back to Romania and tried to meet some of the secret policemen who had done the reporting. And I actually succeeded in meeting three of them. I report on that at the end of the book, what it was like to be with these people, and what terrible nightmares I had after each meeting. But they turned out to be quite forthcoming. One of them wanted to see me any time I went back. He said, ‘Whenever you are in town, please call me and we can get together and have lunch or something.’ And I thought he was a wonderful guy, and a friend of mine knew him and said, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s a sweetheart. You know, he’s the one who always makes the parties after every performance we do’, because he was in some kind of musical group, not as a secret police officer, obviously, but as somebody who played the accordion, I think very well. So I got quite fond of him. I haven’t been able to see him since COVID started. But if I go back to Romania I’d certainly look him up. The one in Bucharest I found very scary. I met him once and that was all. I might have met him once more to give him the book when it was finished. And then the third guy was in, let me see. See who was the third one? I forget what the third guy was.

Vita Peacock: Is that Dragomir?

Katherine Verdery: Yes, that’s the one who was out right in the county, right near the village where I was working. He was based in the capital city, Deva. He had created a stable of informers in the village I was working in and would meet with them periodically, usually in Deva. He would ask them to come and give him their reports. And he was the one with whom I used the most creative introduction. He was the first one I met. And on the advice of a friend of mine, she said, ‘Bring him some flowers’. So I went out and bought him some flowers. And then I’d found his address and rang the doorbell and said, ‘Hello, I have some flowers for you’, as if I might have been a flower delivery person. He invited me up and then took a couple of minutes for us to, for him to realise who I was and to decide whether he was going to talk to me in the hall or invite me into his house. He invited me right past the door. He could shut the door. And then he sat me in a chair right by the door and I talked to him that way for the entire visit. And at the end of it he said, ‘Well, you know, this was interesting. Let’s get together again’. But when I tried to get in touch with him the next year, he said, ‘Please don’t call me’. He was the one who was the most resistant to this whole project of mine.

And from there I did write a couple of other papers on surveillance. I wrote one for a volume from a conference that Setha Low had put together. But I don’t plan to do any more research on this, I’ve kind of finished my academic career. But I’m very pleased that my final book has gotten so much good press. I got some fabulous reviews by important people, and I’ve gotten a lot of people writing me and asking me for conversations. And I’ve made more money on it than on all my other books combined with the royalties. I think that’s related to the fact that the book was translated into Chinese in Taiwan, where it won the Best Book in Translation award last year.

Vita Peacock:  Congratulations Katherine. I was really curious about your title of the book, where you tell the reader at one point that you originally had My Life as a Spy in quotation marks, and then you ultimately decided to remove the quotation marks. It seemed like this was actually quite a key moment and a key analytical decision. I was wondering if you could talk us through that moment and that decision and what it implied for you.

Katherine Verdery: Well, it’s interesting. I don’t have much recollection of making that decision. But it just seemed to me that too many books are written that have quotation marks in the title. And I thought, well, I might as well inhabit the role to which I have been assigned by these officers and just present myself this way and let people wonder what was I really doing there. It didn’t have an analytical point. But those were the kinds of reasons that led me to decide to take it off.

Vita Peacock: That makes sense, if can follow it up with another question. You mention Lacan briefly in the book, but when I was reading the book, the thing that came to mind very strongly was the Jungian concept of the shadow self. In Jung’s conception the shadow takes an individual form in those aspects of the psyche that are instinctive or maybe distasteful to us but then get personified into a character. But then he also argues that communities and collectives do this as well, in that all the things that challenge or conflict with collective values get personified into a shadow as a character outside of this community. The way that you deftly characterize this figure of Vera over the course of the book, comes across almost as this Jungian shadow that is changing as a result of these changing sociopolitical conditions. But then it also becomes a way for you to explore doubts and uncertainties around the role of the ethnographer and the ethnographic process in general. My question is: how do you feel at the end of this process? Because in Jungian analysis, the idea is that you undergo ‘shadow work’, you have to reconcile yourself with your shadow in order to become complete.

But how can one reconcile where the shadow is another entity’s projection? Is it possible for you to reconcile with this figure of Vera? Essentially, how do you feel at the end of this process? Has there been a form of reconciliation or is it impossible to reconcile with something that’s a projection of you, a fiction of you?

Katherine Verdery: I hadn’t really thought about that. I certainly became very fond of her in the course of writing. I like the name. I was very glad that they had given me that name. And it’s also got a nice relationship to the notion of truth of course, Veritas. I felt that in the writing I sometimes was inhabiting that role. But I didn’t see it as something I was doing on purpose to have an analytical effect. I was just playing with it, really. At first, I was very resistant to this whole projection of myself in that guise, but eventually I decided it was kind of fun.

Vita Peacock: How do you feel at the end of that process? Do you feel like Vera is a part of you or that she’s still outside you? What is your relationship to Vera? Is it almost like a friend?

Katherine Verdery: I definitely feel that she had been a kind of alter ego. And certainly when I went back to Romania, I thought about her a lot more than when I had just been here. I saw a film a long time ago, a Hungarian film called Angie Vera. I really liked that film. When I discovered in the file that I was being called Vera, I said, ‘Oh, this is great.’ It reminds me of this movie. With that it was easy to project myself into a movie, in a sense. And that was fun, actually. So there was a way in which I enjoyed setting myself aside and thinking of myself that way. I had a psychologist friend one time who said that she thought I was better at splitting off my personality from myself, as it were, than any person she’d ever known who wasn’t insane (laughs).

Vita Peacock: Wow.

Katherine Verdery:  I may have been predisposed towards this experiment.

Vita Peacock: It’s so interesting, that tension. Because in a way, it’s that analytical detachment that allows that kind of relationship, ethnography is always in that space of tension in some ways. Maybe that’s facilitated your work as an ethnographer.

Rune Steenberg: I have a short follow up on that. So Vera is one of the first name you have in the book. Spy is obviously the other one. That’s also reflected in the title. And how did you feel about seeing yourself as a spy or other people seeing you as a spy? And was it something you came across when you were there also? I’ve come across it in Central Asia, even in the 2000s. And how do you feel about this category? Is it a purely negative category for you or is it does it have a bit of James Bond sort of adventurism to it as well?

Katherine Verdery: Well, I think that in the process of doing this project, I became much more attached to this notion as part of my life. Initially I was very resistant. And in my fieldwork in this village where I started, it happened to me a number of times that people I was going to try to interview but hadn’t much of an exchange with. I’m thinking of one person in particular. I went to this woman’s house. I had talked to her son. And I knocked on her door and asked if she’d be willing to talk with me. Her son had said that she might. She said something like, ‘I don’t know who you really are, but people say you’re a spy, and I don’t want anybody like that in my house.’ So some people put it to me directly. I often got it indirectly by people saying, ‘You know, other people say you’re a spy.’ So they were presenting me with an idea that they may have had some belief in themselves. But they were projecting it off onto one or another friend who probably had said this. The idea was definitely around there and much later after the end of the communist regime there, a number of my friends said, ‘You know, people around here really thought you were a spy.’ And it’s been difficult for us to get rid of that notion, because they had really populated it. Not everybody, of course, but some of them had really taken it on and were certain that I was up to no good. One person told me much later that a dead giveaway to my putative identity, was that the policeman from the commune centre who was supposed to be involved with security would show up in the village often, and he had never done that before. And it turned out that my landlord was reporting on me. He had every reason to know pretty much what I was doing in the village. And so, the notion was circulated in that village, in part through those connections as well. So things did in reality look pretty suspicious. I was doing everything I could to allay those concerns, but it clearly didn’t work.

Rune Steenberg: And back then, your emotions around the word spy were quite negative. But you said they changed during the writing of the book?

Katherine Verdery: Yeah, it was partly because I got used to it and partly because as I read through these files and then had these conversations with the officers, I began seeing it as a plausible interpretation. I wasn’t saying to myself all the time ‘They’re so mistaken and I’m really mad at them.’ I was saying, ‘Oh, you know, I can see that.’ I can see why they would think that. And that that also helped me to kind of settle into it as an identity, a possible identity for myself. How about you? Do you think that would happen to you? Can you imagine being in such a situation?

Rune Steenberg: Well, I have been working in Kyrgyzstan and I’ve been working in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, to which I no longer have access. I’ve come across the trope. And I do think people think I might be a spy and that the government might even have a file for me too that I can access in thirty years time or so and try to write a book about it.

Katherine Verdery: Yeah, it would be nice if they didn’t give it to you for a while to give you time to get used to it. But now you have a guide (laughs).

Rune Steenberg: For sure, yes, definitely. And I think many people do have a guide in your book for work to be to be done in the future. I think that also makes it extremely valuable.

Katherine Verdery: Well, I gather from some friend of mine that courses in field techniques sometimes have assigned this book. Part of its sales figures have to do with it’s being used in courses and that’s great. I’m happy about it. I wrote it to be accessible and to mostly avoid complicated jargon. And so if it’s used in that way, I’m happy.

Deniz Yonucu: Your work is extremely important. In the Anthropology of Surveillance Network, we have been discussing a lot about doing ethnography under surveillance and the dangers of anthropology under surveillance where everyone is suspicious of one another. So your book has been a major contribution to the field in that sense. I’m going to come back to that again. Vita has another question.

Vita Peacock: I did a three-year study of the movement that calls itself Anonymous in the UK, and I was really struck by a similarity between your Romanian interlocutors and these activists in Britain, which is this co-presence of an intense joking life with an intense surveillance and awareness of surveillance. And this was something that was very present in Anonymous, which was constant jokes and joking about whether you were a spy. That also becomes part of the joke as well, at least in the British context. I was wondering if you saw a relationship between the joking and the surveillance, of whether maybe the joking, in a sense, diffused the tension created by a structure of surveillance?

Katherine Verdery: That’s interesting. And it certainly makes a lot of sense. It’s uncomfortable to be living with yourself, knowing that other people do not see you as you think you are, and that they think of you as a kind of person that you really don’t want to be. So coming up with ways to diffuse that through humor and so on, I think makes a lot of sense.

Deniz Yonucu: Definitely. It was the same when I was conducting research in Istanbul’s racialized working class neighborhoods which are under constant surveillance. Because surveillance is such a difficult topic to openly address, jokes are a way to talk about it without seriously talking about it. And in your field, Katherine, it wasn’t just you who had been suspected of being a spy. But probably, community members were also afraid of one another. Overall, a spy figure was probably haunting the entire community. And you were the one who can be more openly addressed as a spy because you were an anthropologist from the United States collecting data about them. Were they also suspicious of one another, which is even more difficult to talk about?

Katherine Verdery: That’s an interesting point. My first reaction is that in the Romanian context, I’m not sure that people would have thought of other Romanians as spies. They would have thought of them as Communist Party members, and that role would include the possibility of clandestine collection of information about people, so that you could never trust a person who was a Communist Party member because you don’t know what they really might be doing with information about you. So it’s different from thinking of the role of spying, but there are some similarities. I think what you’re saying makes a lot of sense.

Deniz Yonucu: You mean spying in practice.

Katherine Verdery: Yes. Right!

Deniz Yonucu:  We also would like to hear your opinions about the current stage of surveillance in anthropology. Surveillance is a relative latecomer to anthropology. And other scholars, scholars from other disciplines, have been addressing these issues for a long time now. Surveillance and Society Journal was founded in 2002. But in anthropology you are among the main figures who initiated a debate about anthropology of surveillance. Why do you think surveillance is a relative newcomer to anthropology? Why hasn’t it emerged or developed as a subfield in anthropology earlier?

Katherine Verdery: Well, as you say, it certainly has now. But I think, maybe it has something to do with the fact that it’s extremely hard to get hold of. You can’t just walk into a village and say, ‘Okay, I want to talk to you about surveillance’. I basically didn’t do that much. I would talk with people about why they thought who they thought I was, people that I knew very well and whether they thought I was up to no good and so on. But those were only a few close friends. Otherwise, if you raise it already, you’re suspected of having the wrong kind of interest. So I think it took a few people starting to approach the subject. John Borneman has been interested in the subject. Also somebody who’s worked in a formerly communist state.

Deniz Yonucu: David Price and Joe Masco too.

Katherine Verdery: Yes, that’s right. I’ve read all of David Price’s books and find them quite useful. And Joe Masco came and gave a talk at my university. We spent a lot of time talking about surveillance then. But as you say, those are relatively recent. I think it’s because the world is becoming more a place of surveillance. I mean, the electronic means for surveillance have proliferated so widely you can’t have a telephone conversation without wondering if it’s being tape recorded. It’s just, you know, any source of or your own work on computers and so on. And I think our world has been populated now with people’s being aware of the possibility, through what electronic means have now offered us in our daily lives.

Deniz Yonucu: Now there’s no escape from surveillance. More and more anthropologists are now focusing on the topic of surveillance in their works. Just to name a few: Sahana Gosh, Farhana Ibrahim, Samar Al-Bulushi, Anselma Gallinat, Darren Byler, among others.

Katherine Verdery: Yeah, right. Well, we study everything, right?

Deniz Yonucu: True. I have another question related to anthropology and surveillance. What do you think is distinct about the anthropological approaches to surveillance? How could anthropology contribute to the studies of surveillance?

Katherine Verdery: Well, I think, taking it as an object without worrying about the truth of it is important. Other people are concerned with whether there really surveillance is. And in my case, I know there was because I see the product of it. But being able to sit back and say, ‘Well, I wonder if this is happening? I wonder if people are seeing me in this way?’ I had to develop that reflex already early in my fieldwork. Because occasionally people would say that to me. Out in the village, they say, ‘You know, people say you’re a spy, we don’t know if we want you to come into our house.’ And I would say, ‘Well, of course I’m not a spy.’ Well, what good was that going to do? I think anthropologists have the capacity and the tendency to objectivise certain things that other disciplines take absolutely as real. And we objectivise it by saying, ‘Well, you know, let’s examine this as a phenomenon.’ Because anything human beings do is open to an anthropologists’ interest. We think about witchcraft for heaven’s sake, and we take that as a real phenomenon. Why not surveillance?

Deniz Yonucu: Definitely.

Vita Peacock: This links in because we’re interested in this transition that you mentioned from the old school informer spy network surveillance regime, to the contemporary surveillance that’s enabled by computerization. As someone who’s thought for a very long time about the Securitate and how security intelligence services work, do you think that this slow work of anthropologists, the work that we do, is still even of interest to contemporary intelligence services, because they don’t need us as mediators to anyone else’s conversations as these can all be fairly easily recorded through the ubiquity of computers. That was the first question. And then if yes, how would you write anthropology if you didn’t necessarily want to be useful to an intelligence service? How would you write an anthropology even down to writing fieldnotes that was not useful? If in a situation where your fieldnotes could potentially be recorded or used.

Katherine Verdery: Well, I think any intelligence officer who knew anything about anthropology would still want to be interested in anthropologists working on it, because anthropologists use methods that enable learning at much closer quarters, what people think about, so we can still be a source of information for them. And then this leads on to the second question, which is how would I write my notes if I suspected I were being followed by them. And I assumed from the very outset that they would be interested in what I was doing. And certainly the file justifies in spades that this was correct.

So I tried to do various things from the very beginning, I tried to figure out how to write my notes in a way that could not be used by intelligence people. I was very naive in thinking that this was even possible. But in my first fieldwork, right up until laptops became common among the regular population, I took my field notes either by hand or with typewriter. I developed pseudonyms for everybody that I spoke with and then had to keep reminding myself who this was, repeating the name in my head and the person attached to it. And I wrote in what I thought was a kind of encrypted form, with anything that I thought was likely to be of any even remote interest. And I didn’t make clear what the relationships among people were. I developed little nicknames for them, so I used those. The subjects of conversation I might not try to disguise as much, but who talked with me about it I was really, really very eager to try to obscure. And to some extent, I think I succeeded. But there are places in which they say practically verbatim, you know, she thinks she’s keeping us from reading this, but she isn’t (laughs). That wasn’t all the time. But no, they got people who are pretty good at English and they figured out my principal means of writing. What was hard to read was that I left out almost all vowels. It made typing faster, and it’s a lot harder to figure out what it says.

Vita Peacock: Like a shorthand?

Katherine Verdery: Yeah. NTRSTD. Interested to me, but they might not figure that out. So. So I used that a lot, and it made writing the fieldnotes faster too.

Once I got to using computers, I was a little bit naive about the possibility that other people could get into my computer in Romania. I think at the beginning it was difficult for them, though eventually they probably did. So I was somewhat less likely to encrypt things, but I still I found it faster to write without the vowels. So as long as I knew what I was trying to say, it was always easy to read it back to myself.

Vita Peacock: So just to clarify, when you say encrypt things, you mean the use of pseudonyms, or did you actually have a code that you developed and used?

Katherine Verdery: I used pseudonyms for people, definitely. But if I’m writing the word interested, I’d write NTRSTD. And so if I started a word with a consonant that in real life has a vowel before it, I’d try to make it one that you could figure out fairly easily if you were an English speaker. So the ‘N’ at the beginning of interested relies on the fact that if I said Nterested, it would be close, if you see what I mean.

Vita Peacock: Wow.

Katherine Verdery: So that was how almost all my fieldnotes are written one way or another.

Deniz Yonucu: You were sending your field notes through the US Embassy, right?

Katherine Verdery: Yes. That was part of the reason I was totally dependent on the American mail system. Although I think it’s certainly possible that people got my fieldnotes out of that mail system, I don’t really have any evidence that they did. Mostly the police came into my room occasionally and photographed my fieldnotes, and then they could sit and ponder them on their own. They didn’t have to go make a deal with the American embassy personnel. We used what was called the diplomatic pouch. Anybody who was there on a research grant, if they were a Fulbright scholar, they already had a government relationship. So that was not a problem. But they also decided to allow people on other kinds of fellowships. There weren’t very many, but IREX was the principal one besides Fulbright. IREX people could use the diplomatic pouch as well. As far as I know, a Romanian was never the person who was going to take that mail out of the drop box and put it into the pouch. That was always being done by an American. So the likelihood that they could get it was fairly low. They could get it from me by getting into my suitcase where I kept my notes, which they did on occasion. Then once I got into using the computer, they couldn’t do that because they put a lot of passwords on it and stuff.

Deniz Yonucu: So I was curious, what about the surveillance from the side of the US government?

Rune Steenberg: I was going to ask the same thing. Do you think they read it?

Katherine Verdery: It’s possible. It’s possible. What I used to do was I’d type my notes in three copies and one of the copies was a very thin onion skin kind of paper. So I could put that copy in the in the pouch, and it wouldn’t be a very heavy envelope compared to the other things, written on fairly heavy cotton paper. So that was heavier. You’re asking if the Americans would have read it?

Rune Steenberg: Yeah, if they would have read it. And if you were thinking about that at the moment.

Deniz Yonucu: If they were interested in it?

Katherine Verdery: I’m not sure they were. Whenever I published a book, I would give a copy of it to the American embassy, and often the ambassador would call me in for a conversation when I was in Bucharest. And he might not have read the book, but he would have looked at it and wanted to see if he could ask me some questions or something. I didn’t see that as threatening in any way. I thought it was reasonable. The embassy is housing these people. They have a right to know at least something about what we’re doing. So I don’t think they were particularly interested in reading it word by word. They too would have had some trouble with my system of encrypting my notes, though they might have guessed faster at an English word written without vowels than a Romanian would.

Rune Steenberg: I was thinking that there could be a file on you in DC as well that will come out at some point.

Katherine Verdery: It could be, but I’m not planning on looking for it. I’ve retired. Enough of this (laughs). You know there was a wonderful quote by Lily Tomlin, ‘No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up’ (laughter).

Deniz Yonucu: It’s true, so true.

Rune Steenberg: We are experiencing that at the moment in our fieldwork for certain.

Deniz Yonucu: I mean, it’s really important to talk about, actually. Like a lot of young scholars who are doing fieldwork right now, sometimes they can get paranoid about ethnographic research. We know that police officers approach anthropologists and ask them to share information with them. I did research in Istanbul, and I have a book on policing and counterinsurgency in Turkey. I know that a lot of Turkish police officers did their PhD in anthropology in the United States, in quite prestigious universities. Police officers, security officers, are really interested in anthropology and ethnography. And what you said is extremely right. Even though high-tech surveillance technologies are developed, they still are interested in ethnographic research conducted by anthropologists or sociologists. So I would like to ask you, what would you suggest to younger anthropologists of surveillance, and how do you see the future of the anthropology of surveillance?

Katherine Verdery: That’s a big a big question. Well, to begin with, I would certainly suggest to younger anthropologists that they read all the stuff that’s out there about surveillance before they get to the field, because Lily Tomlin was right, it’s never enough to keep up. And I think that reading things like spy novels, and other things that presuppose some sorts of clandestine attempts to gain knowledge about another population, would also give them some feeling for the atmosphere that they might be involved in. If I’m interested in surveillance, I would certainly do those things. Trying to develop a sensibility in which you assume that other people are going to be interested in what you have to say. So you’re constantly trying to write your notes with the ear of an interested, but potentially malevolent, reader.

Deniz Yonucu: Exactly, totally.

Katherine Verdery: I certainly wasn’t trained to do that in my original fieldwork.

Deniz Yonucu: I think that’s really, really unfortunate that we didn’t receive this training but actually learn as we go.

Katherine Verdery: You figured it out.

Deniz Yonucu: People are interested in our work, so we need to develop these techniques. We need to be vigilant of the fact that the information we gather about the communities can be used against them. We always have to keep that in mind.

Katherine Verdery: The most important impulse, I think, is the one that leads you to try to protect your principal informants who might be the most likely to be interrogated. This wasn’t necessarily very effective, but I used to send Christmas cards to Romania after I left, before 1989, and I would never put my return address on them. I would just put them in the mail addressed to a particular person. If somebody wanted to open the envelope and then thereby make it unlikely that the recipient would ever get it, they could read what I said. But I would say, in Romanian, happy holidays and I hope you’re all healthy and, how’s Uncle so-and-so, that kind of thing. So it was not at all compromising. Any surveillance on those was going to produce only the information that I had some relationship with these people. Mostly they already knew that.

Rune Steenberg: Do you do you feel now, after having read all of those files and having met with a lot of the people afterwards, that you were able to protect them? That you were able to do that, that they didn’t suffer consequences of having worked with you?

Katherine Verdery: I can only ask them. And mostly the people that I have discussed it with have either said, ‘Well, yeah, I got interrogated by the police’, but a lot of the time, the police wouldn’t be interrogating them. They would just be getting my fieldnotes and copying them and reading them and so on. So people wouldn’t have known. If they get an interrogation of course they know. I asked a bunch of my friends, ‘What was your relationship to the police, as far as I’m concerned? Did they come and bother you about me? Would they interrogate you or ask you questions that you felt uncomfortable with?’ And the answers varied. If I were talking about mainly village people who were just members of the collective farm and didn’t have important positions they would mostly say no, or they would say, well, the occasional policeman might stop by and say, ‘How’s your American doing? Or something like that. But nothing necessarily more pointed. One of my very best friends was the director of a state farm in the county capital. Well, some of the time he went there, he would occasionally say to me, ‘You know, so-and-so came by and was interested to know how you’re doing’. That’s all he had to say for me to know that they probably had asked him some questions. He was extremely crafty and he would have told them something that would lead them astray so I had perfect confidence. But I was worried more about people who wouldn’t have had the degree of education and surefootedness that he had in dealing with such a thing, and who might be just peasants in the collective farm and might be called up and asked questions about me. On the whole, though, one of the sayings that I put in my first book was ‘A sword does not cut off the head that is bowed’. They already had this notion that they should be protecting themselves. People said a version of that to me on occasion. So the sense that you can’t always be completely open about what’s going on in your life was well instilled.

Rune Steenberg: Yes. Thank you for sharing this. One of the reasons I ask is that I have had this experience too, both in Turkey and in China, that people I’ve worked with have been interrogated and people I’ve worked with have even been imprisoned or sent to camps, though I don’t think mainly because of me. But I might have played some small role in that. So it’s something that I think about and struggle with.

Katherine Verdery: Absolutely. I used to worry a lot about what kind of discomfort people would experience. For example, in my book The Vanishing Hectare (Cornell University Press, 2003), about the process of de-collectivization, I spent a lot of time with the woman who was the secretary of the newly formed Post Collective Association, and she told me all kinds of stuff and I did my best to disguise it in my notes and so on. But I was always a little bit worried about that, until she decided she was going to defect. She didn’t want to live in Romania anymore, and she went to Spain to visit a relative and never came home. I was always a little bit concerned about her because she really did know a lot about what I was interested in. Now, this was after the Communist period, and supposedly I wasn’t under such constant surveillance, but they were still active, these guys. They wanted to know what I was interested in. And one of the things they were particularly concerned about was, was Romania going to come off looking bad, from what I said? This is expressed in just so many words at various points in the files, that I read, ‘She’s denigrating Romania in the eyes of the world’. This is a big worry that they had. They could find a denigration anywhere they wanted to look. They could turn it into one, something that I said. Just writing about the second economy, for example, and all the ways in which people tried to avoid participating in the full-fledged collectivized production of agriculture or various other things, that was putting Romania in a bad light. If I tried to explain what was going on, people would know that communism wasn’t working. Things like that.

Rune Steenberg: Well, if the standard of measure is propaganda, then anything that is not propaganda would be denigrating, right?

Katherine Verdery: Yes (laughs) right, pretty much pretty much.

Rune Steenberg: Vita, you had one last question.

Vita Peacock: Yes, I have a final question, which is a summing up question. Having gone through this whole process and going through the range of emotions and responses in the process of reading your file, with the benefit of hindsight, would you recommend that other anthropologists, if they have the opportunity, look at their own files held by police or security services, if these files do exist? Or is it better not to open the Pandora’s box and just focus on your relationships with your research participants?

Katherine Verdery: That’s a tough question. You’re asking me if you had it all to do over again, would you ask for your file? (laughs) I think the answer to that question is, it sort of depends when you ask me, because during the process of reading it and rereading it and rereading it and then trying to write the book, it was very uncomfortable. I would have bad dreams and stuff like that. But then as I gradually got a sense for how I could write what I was going to use them for, I began to feel, well, actually people will find this interesting and even maybe useful. I wouldn’t have ever done it before 1989, obviously, because I wouldn’t have had access to my file. But I found it overall a difficult but ultimately rewarding experience. And it was translated into Romanian and published there and apparently sold quite well.

Rune Steenberg: That’s pretty amazing. Do you feel like it helped you think through or process some of the things that might have been in the back of your mind while you were there also, but that you wouldn’t have been able to process or go through if you didn’t have the other side of it, too?

Katherine Verdery: Oh, absolutely. It gave me back my own field experience in a completely different light and enabled me to see things that I hadn’t understood at the time. So worthwhile. Not pleasant, but worthwhile.

Vita Peacock: Well, we’re really glad that you did go through this painstaking process. And unless anyone has any other questions, I want to thank Katherine Verdery very sincerely and finish with the final sentence of your book, My Life as a Spy, in which you say, ‘I hope to have illuminated something not only of how Romanian socialism worked, but of the new forms of statecraft promising greater security through ever heightened surveillance that are developing worldwide.’ You certainly have showed many insights that I think are transportable: the fragmentation of identity, this illusion of totality, of wholeness, on the part of the surveillor, and the effect on relationships, and on the capacity for intimacy. All of these are themes that you’ve explored forensically in the book and that we as anthropologists of surveillance will carry with us in the coming years. Thank you very much.

Vita Peacock is Principal Investigator of the ERC Project Surveillance and Moral Community: Anthropologies of Monitoring in Germany and Britain (SAMCOM), based in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London.

Deniz Yonucu is a lecturer (Assistant Professor) at Newcastle University. She is the author of Police, Provocation, Politics Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022).

Rune Steenberg is an anthropologist specialising in Xinjiang and the Uyghurs. He earned his PhD from Freie Universität Berlin in 2014 and has since worked in Bonn, New York, London and Copenhagen. He is currently a senior researcher at Palacky University Olomouc.