{"product_id":"my-life-as-a-spy-investigations-in-a-secret-police-file-9780822370819","title":"My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File","description":"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 \u003ci\u003eMy Life as a Spy\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eMy Life as a Spy\u003c\/i\u003e offers a personal account of how government surveillance worked during the Cold War and how Verdery experienced living under it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKatherine 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eSecrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania's Secret Police\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Duke University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51243838505234,"sku":"9780822370819","price":31.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_507e5182-2d07-4a0a-8427-1f765697bb81.jpg?v=1745872805","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/my-life-as-a-spy-investigations-in-a-secret-police-file-9780822370819","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}