Telling difficult stories with fragments of experience: Short-term ethnography in the securitate archives

This chapter explores the value and nature of engagements with archives as a sequence of short-term or focused ethnographies. It focuses on the archives of Romania’s former secret police, the infamous Securitate, curated by the Council for the Study of Securitate Archives (CNSAS) located in Bucharest and Popeşti-Leordeni (Romania). The chapter illustrates how researchers working with previously secret archives can conceive of archives as ethnographic sites that open avenues for unforeseen insights and unanticipated emotional responses. It argues that archival work need not always be characterized by long-term engagement. Archival work involves repeated immersion into people’s biographies in and beyond the archive. The chapter examines parts of Securitate’s archival thread on the Romanian-born French theologian Andrei/André Scrima and shows how ethnographically driven historical research in the archives can help historians of communism move beyond simplistic understandings of experience in terms of mostly formal, narrative sources. Finally, the chapter discusses two distinctive benefits of doing short-term ethnography: a unique opportunity to develop novel anthropological ways of seeing that embrace unplanned readings and unanticipated findings, and an open-ended mode of reinterpreting categories in texts that can lead to more nuanced accounts of past biographies, including the very practices of putting archives together