{"title":"Katherine Verdery","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the insightful works of Katherine Verdery. Explore the intricate layers of political anthropology through her lens, offering rich perspectives on power, identity, and societal change. Start your exploration now.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"my-life-as-a-spy-book-katherine-verdery-9780822370819","title":"My Life As a Spy","description":"As Katherine Verdery observes, \"There's nothing like reading your secret police file to make you wonder who you really are.\" In 1973 Verdery began her doctoral fieldwork in the Transylvanian region of Romania, ruled at the time by communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. She returned several times over the next twenty-five years, during which time the secret police-the Securitate-compiled a massive surveillance file on her. Reading through its 2,781 pages, she learned that she was \"actually\" a spy, a CIA agent, a Hungarian agitator, and a friend of dissidents: in short, an enemy of Romania. In My Life as a Spy she analyzes her file alongside her original field notes and conversations with Securitate officers. Verdery also talks with some of the informers who were close friends, learning the complex circumstances that led them to report on her, and considers how fieldwork and spying can be easily confused. Part memoir, part detective story, part anthropological analysis, My Life as a Spy offers a personal account of how government surveillance worked during the Cold War and how Verdery experienced living under it.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49731612213521,"sku":"NGR9780822370819","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50150703137041,"sku":"CIN0822370816G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51383412359441,"sku":"NIN9780822370819","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51416498635025,"sku":"CIN0822370816VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":52466923340049,"sku":"CIN0822370816A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52994127003921,"sku":"GOR013584186","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0822370816.jpg?v=1763484339"},{"product_id":"peasants-under-siege-book-gail-kligman-9780691149738","title":"Peasants under Siege","description":"In 1949, Romania's fledgling communist regime unleashed a radical and brutal campaign to collectivize agriculture in this largely agrarian country, following the Soviet model. Peasants under Siege provides the first comprehensive look at the far-reaching social engineering process that ensued. Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery examine how collectivization assaulted the very foundations of rural life, transforming village communities that were organized around kinship and status hierarchies into segments of large bureaucratic organizations, forged by the language of \"class warfare\" yet saturated with vindictive personal struggles. Collectivization not only overturned property relations, the authors argue, but was crucial in creating the Party-state that emerged, its mechanisms of rule, and the \"new persons\" that were its subjects. The book explores how ill-prepared cadres, themselves unconvinced of collectivization's promises, implemented technologies and pedagogies imported from the Soviet Union through actions that contributed to the excessive use of force, which Party leaders were often unable to control. In addition, the authors show how local responses to the Party's initiatives compelled the regime to modify its plans and negotiate outcomes. Drawing on archival documents, oral histories, and ethnographic data, Peasants under Siege sheds new light on collectivization in the Soviet era and on the complex tensions underlying and constraining political authority.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50165536948497,"sku":"CIN0691149739G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51323663286545,"sku":"CIN0691149739VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0691149739.jpg?v=1750880928"},{"product_id":"political-lives-of-dead-bodies-book-katherine-verdery-9780231112307","title":"The Political Lives of Dead Bodies","description":"As socialist regimes crumbled across Eastern Europe and statues of their leaders were dismantled, another pattern arose in the former Iron Curtain nations: the bodies of political leaders, revolutionary heroes, artists, and other luminaries were taken from their graves to be reinterred - and in many cases, repatriated - in new, symbolically charged locations. What forces inspired these exhumations of long-dead spirits of Eastern Europe's past, from composer Bela Bartok's New York-Budapest journey to evictions of a group of Romanian communist leaders from their exalted mausoleums to a scattering of humble graveyards? What are the effects for the living of removing the bones of the dead from their resting places for ceremonial - or unceremonious - reburial? In this book, anthrolopogist Katherine Verdery explores Eastern Europe's political transformation from the perspective of sacred, symbolic ways that nations and cultures redefine themselves when new political orders are installed.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50205089562897,"sku":"CIN0231112300G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50213841174801,"sku":"GOR006382522","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231112300.jpg?v=1751291236"},{"product_id":"what-was-socialism-and-what-comes-next-book-katherine-verdery-9780691011325","title":"What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?","description":"Among the first anthropologists to work in Eastern Europe, Katherine Verdery had built up a significant base of ethnographic and historical expertise when the major political transformations in the region began to take place. In this collection of essays dealing with the aftermath of Soviet-style socialism and the different forms that may replace it, she explores the nature of socialism in order to understand more fully its consequences. By analyzing her primary data from Romania and Transylvania and synthesizing information from other sources, Verdery lends a distinctive anthropological perspective to a variety of themes common to political and economic studies on the end of socialism: themes such as \"civil society,\" the creation of market economies, privatization, national and ethnic conflict, and changing gender relations. Under Verdery's examination, privatization and civil society appear not only as social processes, for example, but as symbols in political rhetoric. The classic pyramid scheme is not just a means of enrichment but a site for reconceptualizing the meaning of money and an unusual form of post-Marxist millenarianism. Land being redistributed as private property stretches and shrinks, as in the imaginings of the farmers struggling to tame it. Infused by this kind of ethnographic sensibility, the essays reject the assumption of a transition to capitalism in favor of investigating local processes in their own terms.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50356492894481,"sku":"CIN069101132XA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50936096096529,"sku":"GOR002257381","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52736544473361,"sku":"NIN9780691011325","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53261235912977,"sku":"CIN069101132XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/069101132X.jpg?v=1750847767"},{"product_id":"secrets-and-truths-book-katherine-verdery-9786155225994","title":"Secrets and Truths","description":"Nothing in Soviet-style communism was as shrouded in mystery as its secret police. Its paid employees were known to few and their actual numbers remain uncertain. Its informers and collaborators operated clandestinely under pseudonyms and met their officers in secret locations. Its files were inaccessible, even to most party members. The people the secret police recruited or interrogated were threatened so effectively that some never told even their spouses, and many have held their tongues to this day, long after the regimes fell. With the end of communism, many of the newly established governments - among them Romania's - opened their secret police archives. From those files, especially her own voluminous one, as well as her personal memories and interviews with acquaintances that turned out be informers, the author has carried out historical ethnography of the Romanian Securitate. Secrets and Truths is not only of historical interest but has implications for understanding the rapidly developing \"security state\" of the neoliberal present.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50398572019985,"sku":"CIN6155225990VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51063475568913,"sku":"NIN9786155225994","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51777255211281,"sku":"GOR014400128","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/6155225990.jpg?v=1759509921"},{"product_id":"vanishing-hectare-book-katherine-verdery-9780801488696","title":"The Vanishing Hectare","description":"In most countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the fall of communism opened up the possibility for individuals to acquire land. Based on Katherine Verdery's extensive fieldwork between 1990 and 2001, The Vanishing Hectare explores the importance of land and land ownership to the people of one Transylvanian community, Aurel Vlaicu. Verdery traces how collectivized land was transformed into private property, how land was valued, what the new owners were able to do with it, and what it signified to each of the different groups vying for land rights.   Verdery tells this story about transforming socialist property forms in a global context, showing the fruitfulness of conceptualizing property as a political symbol, as a complex of social relations among people and things, and as a process of assigning value. This book is a window on rural life after socialism but it also provides a framework for assessing the neo-liberal economic policies that have prevailed elsewhere, such as in Latin America. Verdery shows how the trajectory of property after socialism was deeply conditioned by the forms property took in socialism itself; this is in contrast to the image of a \"tabula rasa\" that governed much thinking about post-socialist property reform.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50422902391057,"sku":"CIN0801488699G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51334888882449,"sku":"CIN0801488699VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52879433629969,"sku":"GOR008854282","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0801488699.jpg?v=1760177265"},{"product_id":"political-lives-of-dead-bodies-book-katherine-verdery-9780231112314","title":"The Political Lives of Dead Bodies","description":"Since 1989, scores of bodies across Eastern Europe have been exhumed and brought to rest in new gravesites. Katherine Verdery 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. Enlivening and invigorating the dialogue on postsocialist politics, this imaginative study helps us understand the dynamic and deeply symbolic nature of politics-and how it can breathe new life into old bones.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50449773101329,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50449773330705,"sku":"GOR010463810","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52109061652753,"sku":"GOR010280940","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53133688340753,"sku":"CIN0231112319G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53240169398545,"sku":"CIN0231112319A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231112319.jpg?v=1750908542"},{"product_id":"dixie-doll-book-katherine-verdery-9781258063016","title":"A Dixie Doll","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51097499992337,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51097501892881,"sku":"NIN9781258063016","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1258063018.jpg?v=1751368321"},{"product_id":"my-life-as-a-spy-book-katherine-verdery-9780822370666","title":"My Life As a Spy","description":"Katherine Verdery analyzes the 2,781 page surveillance file the Romanian secret police compiled on her during her research trips to Transylvania in the 1970s and 1980s. Reading it led her to question her identity and also revealed how deeply the secret police was embedded in everyday life.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53035343511825,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53035343872273,"sku":"NIN9780822370666","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780822370666.jpg?v=1768747265"},{"product_id":"national-ideology-under-socialism-book-katherine-verdery-9780520203587","title":"National Ideology Under Socialism","description":"The current transformation of many Eastern European societies is impossible to understand without comprehending the intellectual struggles surrounding nationalism in the region. Anthropologist Katherine Verdery shows how the example of Romania suggests that current ethnic tensions come not from a resurrection of pre-Communist Nationalism but from the strengthening of national ideologies under Communist Party rule.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53521229381905,"sku":"NLS9780520203587","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780520203587.jpg?v=1778579413"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-ie\/collections\/author-books-by-katherine-verdery.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}