Anthropologizing Eastern Europe: A Brief History of Forming an Ethnographic Region

Sociocultural Workshop:

Anthropologizing Eastern Europe:
A Brief History of Forming an Ethnographic Region

Katherine Verdery
Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor Emerita, Anthropology
City University of New York



Katherine Verdery, who obtained her Ph.D. at Stanford University, has conducted field research in Romania since 1973, initially focusing on the political economy of social inequality, ethnic relations, and nationalism. 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 (2003) received the J. R. Staley Prize in Anthropology. She completed 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, Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949–1962 (2011), received a number of prizes in Slavic studies and in sociology.

Verdery’s teaching interests include contemporary and socialist Eastern Europe, the anthropology of property, and time and space. Recent books include "Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of the Romanian Secret Police" (Central European University Press, 2014) and "My Life as a Spy: Investigations In a Secret Police File" (Duke University Press, 2018).