Nadkarni, Maya

English

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Swarthmore College Works   Sociology & Anthropology Faculty Works   6-25-2014  Review Of "Secrets And Truths: Ethnography In The Archive Of Romania’s Secret Police" By K. Verdery  Maya Nadkarni Swarthmore College, mnadkar1@swarthmore.edu   Let us know how access to this work benefits you.  Follow this and additional works at: http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-soc-anth   Part of the Anthropology Commons   Recommended Citation Maya Nadkarni. (2014). "Review Of "Secrets And Truths: Ethnography In The Archive Of Romania’S Secret Police" By K. Verdery". CritCom. http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-soc-anth/107  This work is brought to you for free and open access by the Swarthmore College Libraries. It has been accepted for inclusion in Sociology & Anthropology Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. 1/3Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’sSecret Policecouncilforeuropeanstudies.org/critcom/secrets-and-truths-ethnography-in-the-archive-of-romanias-secret-police/Nearly 3,000 pages of photographs, informer reports, activity logs, transcribedtelephone conversations, and similar materials compose the Securitatesurveillance file for the target known as Vera, Folclorista, Katy, Vanesa, Kora,Viky, or Venera: the anthropologist Katherine Verdery, who spent more thanthree years in the 1970s and 1980s conducting ethnographic research incommunist Romania. In 2006, Verdery requested a copy of her file, and theexperience of making sense of the political and epistemological principles thatorganized its production is one of the inspirations for Secrets and Truths.Originally presented for the annual Natalie Zemon Davis lecture series atCentral European University in 2012, this ambitious and wide-ranging set ofessays reverses the gaze of the security apparatus by treating its archive not asa source of information about its targets, but as an ethnographic object in itsown right. Verdery draws upon the files of herself and others, as well as recentscholarship on state security services across the former Soviet bloc, to offer avivid and nuanced analysis of the “world view and practices” of the secret policeand their informers (p. 40) – and thus to contribute to a historical ethnography ofthe socialist state itself.In three chapters that examine the secret police and its archive in terms of material practices, modes of secrecy,and forms of knowledge production, Verdery dismantles many commonplace assumptions that have structured thepost-socialist life of the files over the past two decades. Chapter 1, “An Archive and Its Fictions,” argues that neitherthe secret police nor its files were as monolithic as they have usually been perceived. “Conspirativity”(conspirativitate) – the demand for compartmentalization that kept each officer’s informers and activities a secretfrom his colleagues as well as the public – produced a remarkable degree of organizational incoherence andinefficiency, as officers unknowingly duplicated each other’s efforts. Given this segmentation of work practices,Verdery argues, it was solely the production and circulation of the physical files themselves that helped to constitutethose employed by the Securitate as a collective actor, united through the shared labor of contributing andannotating reports and analysis. Indeed, because conspirativity dictated that full access to the files was limited to ahandful of high-ranking officials, it is perhaps only now that the files are open to post-socialist public scrutiny thatboth the Securitate and its archive can be analyzed as the “coherent, unified entities” that they were not in practice(p. 68).Chapter 2, “The Secrets of a Secret Police,” extends this discussion of the consequences of conspirativity toexamine more broadly the role of secrecy within the socialist state. Secrecy was central to the state project of Sovietcommunism, whose origins as a persecuted illegal movement gave heightened emphasis to the need to protectstate secrets and root out hidden enemies. Rather than limit her task to the hunt for scandalous secrets thatcharacterizes much post-socialist inquiry into the secret police archives, Verdery suggests that the content of thesecret may be less important than understanding the historical, cultural, and social-structural relations that produceit. To pursue this argument, she considers the Securitate as a secret society, drawing comparative examples fromthe anthropological and historical literature to analyze Securitate recruitment practices as a form of ritual initiationand to illuminate the political and social conditions that enables such secret societies to flourish. She then exploresstate socialist secrecy as a practice structured by technologies of exclusion, obstruction, and – ironically –revelation, with spectacles of unmasking and denunciation that did not undermine the power of the secret but onlyhelped to enhance its mystique. This mystique and the fear that the secret inspired, Verdery concludes, was crucial2/3to concealing the sometimes-chaotic inefficiency produced by conspirativity within the Securitate, as well as theconflicts and tensions behind the imposing façade of the party-state.Finally, in Chapter 3, “Knowledge Practices and the Social Relations of Surveillance,” Verdery analyzes theknowledge practices revealed in the files. Because personhood in socialist societies was understood as sociallyembedded rather than autonomous, Verdery argues that the true object of state surveillance was not the individual,but his or her social networks. Building on Foucault’s formulation of power as productive as well as repressive, shedemonstrates that the Securitate’s task was not merely to destroy existing loyalties and attachments. Instead, itsought to reforge social relations with the party-state as mediator – and thus to alter “the very kinds of human beings[these networks] enmeshed” (p. 201).Uniting these three chapters is an important critique of the role of the archives in processes of transitional justice.Verdery argues that attempts to use surveillance files as a source of truth-value fail to appreciate the practices thatcomposed the archive itself: “Informers reported under duress, out of malice, or inaccurately; case officers madetendentious interpretations that suited their ends; destruction of files left enormous lacunae in the corpus; agentsopened files on people even when their ‘recruits’ refused to cooperate; the demands of the planned economy setperformance targets that compelled sloppy work; competition among officers and branches of the secret serviceaggravated that tendency; and so forth” (p. 71–72).  Moreover, Verdery maintains, given that the Securitate targetedsocial networks rather than individuals, the call for individual accountability fundamentally distorts the very nature ofinforming (p. 210). Verdery thus joins other anthropologists of the archive, such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot and AnnStoler, to advocate examining the files not as a “source of knowledge but “a form of it” (p. 159). In so doing, heranalysis reveals that the officers’ practices of knowledge-gathering followed a performative logic rather than adescriptive one:  that is, the secret police produced the category of enemy and then “populate[d] it with real people”(p. 64). The role of the file, therefore, was to substantiate a guilt that was always already presumed.Yet, as Verdery also notes, the assumption that their target was an enemy did not free these officers from the workof amassing and analyzing evidence to determine “what kind of enemy she is” (p. 162). Another key contribution ofSecrets and Truths is thus her insistence that we understand the secret police not as the embodiment of absoluteevil, but as “serious practitioners of a form of inquiry” (p. 74), with their own knowledge practices and culturalcategories. Without either surrendering to or relinquishing moral outrage at the harm the Securitate caused, Verderyargues for practicing anthropological estrangement in order to analyze the secret police as an institution within theparty-state bureaucracy possessing its own internal politics, professional challenges and rewards, and “unfoldinghistoricity” (p. 28). One of the many advantages of this approach is that it enables Verdery to uncover startlingparallels between the work of the secret police and her own research as an ethnographer: both trained to “makeclose examinations of everyday behavior and interpret what they found” (p. 7). This uncanny formulation of thepolice as fellow ethnographers (albeit ones constrained by an interpretive grid that pre-determined what they found)enables Verdery to reconsider the very premises of her own ethnographic practice – and thus to offer a model forfuture anthropological research on the archive.The origin of Secrets and Truths as a lecture series means that it raises a number of provocative questions that Ilook forward to seeing Verdery address in greater detail in her forthcoming book, My Life as a Spy: Memoirs of aCold War Anthropologist. For example, I am curious to learn more about her conversations – or confrontations –with those who informed upon her, and how they understood the role of the secret police in their lives. As Verdery’sanalysis makes clear, due to the organizational constraints of conspirativity, there was more room to maneuver andeven refuse than most potential recruits realized. Knowledge of such possibility, however, is only available now inretrospect, through memoirs of the courageous and reports in the files themselves. Further discussion of herinformers’ perceptions and decision-making could help to augment Verdery’s analysis of fear as a social fact, byproviding an ethnographic perspective on the Securitate’s manipulation of affect, and how it impacted both socialrelations and understandings of personal agency.Similarly, while outside the intended scope of her study, the anthropology of post-socialism has so much to learn 3/3from Verdery’s rigorous historical ethnography that it might be fruitful to explore in more detail the role the files playin the present day. In her conclusion, Verdery does discuss the contemporary implications of her findings byobserving that surveillance practices are not merely part of the communist past, but the West’s present and futureas well, given corporate data-mining and the ever-expanding “war on terror.” While both the nature and thetechnology of surveillance practices have changed since the end of the Cold War, Verdery convincingly argues thatthe most crucial shift has been in the subjects produced by these technologies, who now mostly view them withcomplacency as the inevitable cost of living in convenience and safety. Verdery’s goal here is to draw new andsurprising links between seemingly incompatible examples – communist past and contemporary West – but thiscomparison also inspires questions about how post-socialist experiences of neo-liberalism and the “security state”may be intersecting with the legacies of state socialist surveillance and the uses of its files today. Why has thearchive – both its status and its contents – become increasingly central to the way the socialist past is rememberedand debated? What politics of knowledge drive the post-socialist desire to see these files as the source of truth,however misguided this desire may be? And what contemporary understandings of selfhood, morality, and therelationship to the state underpin attempts to blame the injustices of the past upon individuals whom, as Verderyargues, may deserve as much compassion as condemnation (p. 211)?At once astute analysis and compelling auto-ethnography, Secrets and Truths is a key addition to two emerginggenres of interdisciplinary scholarship on communism’s state security archives: studies of the politics and aestheticsof the knowledge produced by the secret police (Andreas Glaeser 2011, Cristina Vatulescu 2010) and personalrecollections and reflections by the targets of that surveillance (Timothy Garton Ash 1997, Sheila Fitzpatrick 2013,as well as numerous memoirs from within the former Soviet bloc). The book’s contributions, however, go far beyondits regional scope. The unexpected parallels Verdery draws between traditional “secret societies” and the secretpolice, for example, offer a welcome advance within the anthropology of secrecy. Moreover, Verdery’s critique of thearchives as a source of historical truth and thus justice is of vital interest to historical anthropologists, and also posesa valuable intervention within the interdisciplinary scholarship on transitional justice and reconciliation across theglobe.Reviewed by Maya Nadkarni of Swarthmore CollegeSecrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’s Secret Policeby Katherine VerderyCentral European University PressPaperback / 294 pages / 2013ISBN: 978 6155225994

Review Of  Secrets And Truths: Ethnography In The Archive Of Romania’s Secret Police  By K. Verdery

Swarthmore College 
Works 
 
 
Sociology & Anthropology Faculty Works 
 
 
6-25-2014 
 
Review Of "Secrets And Truths: 
Ethnography In The Archive Of 
Romania’s Secret Police" By K. Verdery 
 
Maya Nadkarni 
Swarthmore College, mnadkar1@swarthmore.edu  
 
Let us know how access to this work benefits you. 
 
Follow this and additional works at: http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-soc-anth  
 Part of the Anthropology Commons 
 
 
Recommended Citation 
Maya Nadkarni. (2014). "Review Of "Secrets And Truths: Ethnography In The Archive Of Romania’S 
Secret Police" By K. Verdery". CritCom. 
http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-soc-anth/107 
 
This work is brought to you for free and open access by the Swarthmore College Libraries. It has 
been accepted for inclusion in Sociology & Anthropology Faculty Works by an authorized 
administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. 
1/3
Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’s
Secret Police
councilforeuropeanstudies.org/critcom/secrets-and-truths-ethnography-in-the-archive-of-romanias-secret-police/
Nearly 3,000 pages of photographs, informer reports, activity logs, transcribed
telephone conversations, and similar materials compose the Securitate
surveillance file for the target known as Vera, Folclorista, Katy, Vanesa, Kora,
Viky, or Venera: the anthropologist Katherine Verdery, who spent more than
three years in the 1970s and 1980s conducting ethnographic research in
communist Romania. In 2006, Verdery requested a copy of her file, and the
experience of making sense of the political and epistemological principles that
organized its production is one of the inspirations for Secrets and Truths.
Originally presented for the annual Natalie Zemon Davis lecture series at
Central European University in 2012, this ambitious and wide-ranging set of
essays reverses the gaze of the security apparatus by treating its archive not as
a source of information about its targets, but as an ethnographic object in its
own right. Verdery draws upon the files of herself and others, as well as recent
scholarship on state security services across the former Soviet bloc, to offer a
vivid and nuanced analysis of the “world view and practices” of the secret police
and their informers (p. 40) – and thus to contribute to a historical ethnography of
the socialist state itself.
In three chapters that examine the secret police and its archive in terms of material practices, modes of secrecy,
and forms of knowledge production, Verdery dismantles many commonplace assumptions that have structured the
post-socialist life of the files over the past two decades. Chapter 1, “An Archive and Its Fictions,” argues that neither
the secret police nor its files were as monolithic as they have usually been perceived. “Conspirativity”
(conspirativitate) – the demand for compartmentalization that kept each officer’s informers and activities a secret
from his colleagues as well as the public – produced a remarkable degree of organizational incoherence and
inefficiency, as officers unknowingly duplicated each other’s efforts. Given this segmentation of work practices,
Verdery argues, it was solely the production and circulation of the physical files themselves that helped to constitute
those employed by the Securitate as a collective actor, united through the shared labor of contributing and
annotating reports and analysis. Indeed, because conspirativity dictated that full access to the files was limited to a
handful of high-ranking officials, it is perhaps only now that the files are open to post-socialist public scrutiny that
both the Securitate and its archive can be analyzed as the “coherent, unified entities” that they were not in practice
(p. 68).
Chapter 2, “The Secrets of a Secret Police,” extends this discussion of the consequences of conspirativity to
examine more broadly the role of secrecy within the socialist state. Secrecy was central to the state project of Soviet
communism, whose origins as a persecuted illegal movement gave heightened emphasis to the need to protect
state secrets and root out hidden enemies. Rather than limit her task to the hunt for scandalous secrets that
characterizes much post-socialist inquiry into the secret police archives, Verdery suggests that the content of the
secret may be less important than understanding the historical, cultural, and social-structural relations that produce
it. To pursue this argument, she considers the Securitate as a secret society, drawing comparative examples from
the anthropological and historical literature to analyze Securitate recruitment practices as a form of ritual initiation
and to illuminate the political and social conditions that enables such secret societies to flourish. She then explores
state socialist secrecy as a practice structured by technologies of exclusion, obstruction, and – ironically –
revelation, with spectacles of unmasking and denunciation that did not undermine the power of the secret but only
helped to enhance its mystique. This mystique and the fear that the secret inspired, Verdery concludes, was crucial
2/3
to concealing the sometimes-chaotic inefficiency produced by conspirativity within the Securitate, as well as the
conflicts and tensions behind the imposing façade of the party-state.
Finally, in Chapter 3, “Knowledge Practices and the Social Relations of Surveillance,” Verdery analyzes the
knowledge practices revealed in the files. Because personhood in socialist societies was understood as socially
embedded rather than autonomous, Verdery argues that the true object of state surveillance was not the individual,
but his or her social networks. Building on Foucault’s formulation of power as productive as well as repressive, she
demonstrates that the Securitate’s task was not merely to destroy existing loyalties and attachments. Instead, it
sought to reforge social relations with the party-state as mediator – and thus to alter “the very kinds of human beings
[these networks] enmeshed” (p. 201).
Uniting these three chapters is an important critique of the role of the archives in processes of transitional justice.
Verdery argues that attempts to use surveillance files as a source of truth-value fail to appreciate the practices that
composed the archive itself: “Informers reported under duress, out of malice, or inaccurately; case officers made
tendentious interpretations that suited their ends; destruction of files left enormous lacunae in the corpus; agents
opened files on people even when their ‘recruits’ refused to cooperate; the demands of the planned economy set
performance targets that compelled sloppy work; competition among officers and branches of the secret service
aggravated that tendency; and so forth” (p. 71–72).  Moreover, Verdery maintains, given that the Securitate targeted
social networks rather than individuals, the call for individual accountability fundamentally distorts the very nature of
informing (p. 210). Verdery thus joins other anthropologists of the archive, such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Ann
Stoler, to advocate examining the files not as a “source of knowledge but “a form of it” (p. 159). In so doing, her
analysis reveals that the officers’ practices of knowledge-gathering followed a performative logic rather than a
descriptive one:  that is, the secret police produced the category of enemy and then “populate[d] it with real people”
(p. 64). The role of the file, therefore, was to substantiate a guilt that was always already presumed.
Yet, as Verdery also notes, the assumption that their target was an enemy did not free these officers from the work
of amassing and analyzing evidence to determine “what kind of enemy she is” (p. 162). Another key contribution of
Secrets and Truths is thus her insistence that we understand the secret police not as the embodiment of absolute
evil, but as “serious practitioners of a form of inquiry” (p. 74), with their own knowledge practices and cultural
categories. Without either surrendering to or relinquishing moral outrage at the harm the Securitate caused, Verdery
argues for practicing anthropological estrangement in order to analyze the secret police as an institution within the
party-state bureaucracy possessing its own internal politics, professional challenges and rewards, and “unfolding
historicity” (p. 28). One of the many advantages of this approach is that it enables Verdery to uncover startling
parallels between the work of the secret police and her own research as an ethnographer: both trained to “make
close examinations of everyday behavior and interpret what they found” (p. 7). This uncanny formulation of the
police as fellow ethnographers (albeit ones constrained by an interpretive grid that pre-determined what they found)
enables Verdery to reconsider the very premises of her own ethnographic practice – and thus to offer a model for
future anthropological research on the archive.
The origin of Secrets and Truths as a lecture series means that it raises a number of provocative questions that I
look forward to seeing Verdery address in greater detail in her forthcoming book, My Life as a Spy: Memoirs of a
Cold War Anthropologist. For example, I am curious to learn more about her conversations – or confrontations –
with those who informed upon her, and how they understood the role of the secret police in their lives. As Verdery’s
analysis makes clear, due to the organizational constraints of conspirativity, there was more room to maneuver and
even refuse than most potential recruits realized. Knowledge of such possibility, however, is only available now in
retrospect, through memoirs of the courageous and reports in the files themselves. Further discussion of her
informers’ perceptions and decision-making could help to augment Verdery’s analysis of fear as a social fact, by
providing an ethnographic perspective on the Securitate’s manipulation of affect, and how it impacted both social
relations and understandings of personal agency.
Similarly, while outside the intended scope of her study, the anthropology of post-socialism has so much to learn
 
3/3
from Verdery’s rigorous historical ethnography that it might be fruitful to explore in more detail the role the files play
in the present day. In her conclusion, Verdery does discuss the contemporary implications of her findings by
observing that surveillance practices are not merely part of the communist past, but the West’s present and future
as well, given corporate data-mining and the ever-expanding “war on terror.” While both the nature and the
technology of surveillance practices have changed since the end of the Cold War, Verdery convincingly argues that
the most crucial shift has been in the subjects produced by these technologies, who now mostly view them with
complacency as the inevitable cost of living in convenience and safety. Verdery’s goal here is to draw new and
surprising links between seemingly incompatible examples – communist past and contemporary West – but this
comparison also inspires questions about how post-socialist experiences of neo-liberalism and the “security state”
may be intersecting with the legacies of state socialist surveillance and the uses of its files today. Why has the
archive – both its status and its contents – become increasingly central to the way the socialist past is remembered
and debated? What politics of knowledge drive the post-socialist desire to see these files as the source of truth,
however misguided this desire may be? And what contemporary understandings of selfhood, morality, and the
relationship to the state underpin attempts to blame the injustices of the past upon individuals whom, as Verdery
argues, may deserve as much compassion as condemnation (p. 211)?
At once astute analysis and compelling auto-ethnography, Secrets and Truths is a key addition to two emerging
genres of interdisciplinary scholarship on communism’s state security archives: studies of the politics and aesthetics
of the knowledge produced by the secret police (Andreas Glaeser 2011, Cristina Vatulescu 2010) and personal
recollections and reflections by the targets of that surveillance (Timothy Garton Ash 1997, Sheila Fitzpatrick 2013,
as well as numerous memoirs from within the former Soviet bloc). The book’s contributions, however, go far beyond
its regional scope. The unexpected parallels Verdery draws between traditional “secret societies” and the secret
police, for example, offer a welcome advance within the anthropology of secrecy. Moreover, Verdery’s critique of the
archives as a source of historical truth and thus justice is of vital interest to historical anthropologists, and also poses
a valuable intervention within the interdisciplinary scholarship on transitional justice and reconciliation across the
globe.
Reviewed by Maya Nadkarni of Swarthmore College
Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’s Secret Police
by Katherine Verdery
Central European University Press
Paperback / 294 pages / 2013
ISBN: 978 6155225994


https://works.swarthmore.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1106&amp;context=fac-soc-anth

Review Of Secrets And Truths: Ethnography In The Archive Of Romania’s Secret Police By K. Verdery

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