Spying and doing fieldwork in the East

This article reflects on the anthropological scholarship of Katherine Verdery, especially her last book, My life as a spy, to explore the conditions of doing fieldwork and producing knowledge in the European East during the Cold War and onwards. In particular, I attend to the themes of secrecy, identity, surveillance, and power that are integral to fieldwork and anthropological practice more generally beyond the confines of Eastern Europe and that resonate in different contexts of authoritarianism and securitization.