Targeted by Romania's Securitate

摘要

When Katherine Verdery left the Stanford University campus in 1973 to embark on doctoral dissertation research in Romania, she had only a rudimentary knowledge of the language and even less awareness of that country's prevailing social and political conditions. Her goal as an aspiring anthropologist was to compile an ethnographic study of the Transylvanian region. Spending more than three years there conducting extensive fieldwork prior to the fall of the Communist regime, and periodically again in the 1990s, Verdery managed to forge close friendships with a variety of Romanians-academics as well as simple villagers. Yet her deepest explorations commenced later, in 2008, after obtaining a copy of her secret police dossier-a total of 2,781 pages-from the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS).