Suspicion, empathy, and the archival imagination

Abstract

This article celebrates Katherine Verdery’s impact on the discipline of cultural anthropology through an exploration of the intersection of suspicion, empathy, and the archival imagination in ethnographic research, drawing on Verdery’s experiences during her decades of fieldwork in Romania. Verdery’s encounters with state surveillance, exemplified by her analysis of her Securitate secret police file, challenge conventional notions of ethnography and simultaneously inflect the archival turn within cultural anthropology. I argue that in Verdery’s writing, suspicion is a form of empathy and a code that builds an algorithmic architecture through which force is exerted—both in the institutions which operationalize intelligence files and in the habitus of those who become informants.