On her book My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File
Cover Interview of January 23, 2019
The wide angle
The book is highly relevant to contemporary life, in which
forms of surveillance have become ubiquitous, although they differ from the
ones I describe. It encourages readers to ask how these various forms
differ—such as, does postmodern surveillance create identity “doubles”
(doppelgangers), as communist surveillance did? What forms of knowledge do the
two types rely on, and what are the implications for our social relations with
others? Those interested in Foucauldian ideas about surveillance will find here
some thought-provoking comparisons.
Anthropologists rarely find themselves with sources of this
kind. How did I come to acquire mine? Following the overthrow of communist
governments in Eastern Europe in 1989, a number of the successor governments
instituted a process generally known as “lustration” (purification), to prevent
people who had profited from the communist regime from also doing so in the new
system. Lustration involved opening the archives of the secret police, both
making them visible to the public and enabling people who had been under
surveillance to track their own relationship to the apparatus of repression. This
process began in Romania in 1999. Having completed a book for which I had used
the secret police archives, I let an archivist persuade me to apply for my own
file, though I had no clear idea of how I would use it. Once I received it (all
2,781 pages) I thought I might write a memoir of my field experience. The
memoir morphed into something more complex—part memoir, part social science
exploration of surveillance itself.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The wide angle
The book is highly relevant to contemporary life, in which forms of surveillance have become ubiquitous, although they differ from the ones I describe. It encourages readers to ask how these various forms differ—such as, does postmodern surveillance create identity “doubles” (doppelgangers), as communist surveillance did? What forms of knowledge do the two types rely on, and what are the implications for our social relations with others? Those interested in Foucauldian ideas about surveillance will find here some thought-provoking comparisons.
Anthropologists rarely find themselves with sources of this kind. How did I come to acquire mine? Following the overthrow of communist governments in Eastern Europe in 1989, a number of the successor governments instituted a process generally known as “lustration” (purification), to prevent people who had profited from the communist regime from also doing so in the new system. Lustration involved opening the archives of the secret police, both making them visible to the public and enabling people who had been under surveillance to track their own relationship to the apparatus of repression. This process began in Romania in 1999. Having completed a book for which I had used the secret police archives, I let an archivist persuade me to apply for my own file, though I had no clear idea of how I would use it. Once I received it (all 2,781 pages) I thought I might write a memoir of my field experience. The memoir morphed into something more complex—part memoir, part social science exploration of surveillance itself.