Anthropology Colloquium is the department’s speaker series that invites a mixture of anthropologists from within and outside of UBC to present their research. This speaker series is scheduled throughout the academic year, typically with a lunch reception in the AnSo Lounge.
Secrets and Truths: Knowledge Practices of the Romanian Secret Police
Thursday September 19th, 2013
Anso 134, 11:30-1:00
Katherine Verdey
Professor of Anthropology,
City College of New York Graduate Program
Abstract:
The opening of secret police archived in some Eastern European countries after 1989 has provided an unusual opportunity to learn how these organizations worked. This talk uses my own secret police file from Romania to discuss the techniques through which the Romanian Securitate sought to gather information and create knowledge. Concentration particularly on the use of secret informers, I will show how these techniques aimed also to transform the people subjected to them.
Bio:
Katherine Verdery is Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology. Since 1973 she has conducted field research in Romania, initially emphasizing the political economy of social inequality, ethnic relations, and nationalism. In 1999 Katherine Verdery published The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. NY: Columbia University Press, wherein she investigates ” why certain corpses — the bodies of revolutionary leaders, heroes, artists, and other luminaries, as well as more humble folk — have taken on a political life in the turbulent times following the end of Communist Party rule, and what roles they play in revising the past and reorienting the present.” With the changes of 1989, her work has shifted to problems of the transformation of socialist systems, specifically changing property relations in agriculture. From 1993 to 2000 she did fieldwork on this theme in a Transylvanian community; the resulting book, The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania, was published by Cornell University Press (2003). She is now completing a large collaborative project with Gail Kligman (UCLA) and a number of Romanian scholars on the opposite process, the formation of collective and state farms in Romania during the 1950s. The resulting book, Romania’s War on the Peasants: Collectivization 1949-1962, will be published in 2010.
