Verdery , Katherine My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 385 on dismissing and delegating nationalism to bourgeois capitalism, only to reverse its cause, as demonstrated by Lučić’s examination of the role of the partyleadershipanditsmembers,intellectualsandordinarycitizens.Reactions from other parts of the country and verification through a federal system was as important if not more so, than local dynamics. Lučić’s contextualization shows once again how methodologically and factually limited, if not utterly wrong, recently acclaimed studies in ‘Croatian tourism during Socialism’ or ‘ethnic relations in Socialist Macedonia’ have been, all of which tried to avoid the overarching Yugoslav framework. While not entirely necessary to enhance her argument, Iva Lučić’s reliance on the theoretical framework of social movements in terms of mobilization, structures, resources and conceptual framing by political actors, turns out to be very useful in organizing and formulating her arguments. While her archival investigation is limited to the most important but relatively narrow timeframe of 1956–71, when the question was deemed resolved, Iva Lučić’s meticulous study goes further, offering a detailed and systematic, theoretically- and methodologically-layered analysis of Muslim nation-building in all aspects of Socialist Yugoslavia. With recent studies by Armina Omerika and Xavier Bougarel, the history of Bošnjaks as a nation in the twentieth century is finally emerging, based on solid factual and theoretical foundations, able to resist political manipulation and myth making. Finally, Iva Lučić’s meticulousness is echoed by Uppsala University’s publishers, who have produced a superb looking volume that includes an index, several tables, a lengthy English summary and only two errata found in a book of over 330 pages. This book is a feast of scholarship and publishing, of the kind that now rarely appears from more commercialized English-language university presses. UCL SSEES Bojan Aleksov Verdery, Katherine. My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File. Duke University Press, Durham, NC and London, 2018. xvi + 323 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $27.95: £20.99 (paperback). ‘There’snothinglikereadingyoursecretpolicefiletomakeyouwonderwhoyou really are’ (p. xi). With this conclusion Verdery, a distinguished anthropologist and author of seminal studies that have offered a fresh understanding of Communist Romania and its past (Transylvanian Villagers: Three Centuries of Political, Economic, and Ethnic Change, Berkeley, CA, 1983; National Ideology under Socialism, Berkeley, CA, 1991; What was Socialism and What Comes Next?, Princeton, NJ, 1996; The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 386 Postsocialist Transylvania, Ithaca, NY, 2003), opens her interrogation of her own file, compiled by the Romanian Securitate. It offers a remarkable example of introspection, notable for its candour. It is at once a work of oral and personal history, as well as an anthropological study. The author stands both outside and within her past, addressing it with the persistence and incisiveness of an inquisitor, comparing her file with her case-notes. As such, Verdery provides a unique contribution in English to analyses of the intrusion by the totalitarian state into the daily lives of its citizens and the methods employed to do so. Verdery visited Transylvania in 1973 to conduct anthropological research on village life. She returned for further study several times in the 1970s and 1980s, totalling more than three years. Her presence and activity attracted the close attention of the Securitate, generating almost 3,000 pages of informer reports, surveillance logs and transcriptions of telephone conversations. In 2006, Verdery requested a copy of her file, the dissection and exegesis of which forms the basis of this stimulating and riveting book. ‘Stimulating’ because by subjecting her file to an anthropological analysis, Verdery challenges the conventional reading of secret police files, thereby inviting us to reconsider the values accorded them; ‘riveting’ because she uses her file to show how the Securitate’s fears of espionage dogged her research and how she unwittingly fed those fears. On reading her file, she discovered that she was considered a spy, a CIA agent, a Hungarian agitator, a friend of dissidents. As she studied the Securitate officers’ views of her, she admits, ‘I came to question my work, my intentions, and my very identity […] the file made me contemplate what it means to be suspected of spying and to what extent...