An Anthropologist under Surveillance in Ceauşescu’s Romania

U.S. anthropologists working in Romania in the 1970s and 1980s were under surveillance by the Romanian Securitate, as they probably were in other communist countries as well. This article is based on the author’s Securitate file, which a law passed in 1999 made available to anyone whom the Securitate had followed. It discusses similarities between the work of ethnographers and that of the Securitate, the question whether villagers believed that she was really a spy and the effects of the surveillance on the author’s own work and on the villagers she studied