Telling stories with fragments of experience: Short-term ethnography in the Securitate Archives

In this chapter, we explore the value and nature of engagements with archives as a sequence of short-term or focused ethnographies. We explore 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). We illustrate how researchers working with previously secret archives can conceive of archives as ethnographic sites that open avenues for unforeseen insights and unanticipated emotional responses. We argue that archival work need not always be characterized by long-term engagement. Archival work involves what Pink & Morgan (2013) call “intensive excursions,” repeated immersions into people’s biographies in and beyond the archive. In this chapter, we examine parts of Securitate’s archival thread on the Romanian-born French theologian Andrei/André Scrima and show 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, we discuss two distinctive benefits of doing short-term ethnography: a) a unique opportunity to develop novel anthropological ways of seeing that stem from an empirical attitude that embraces unplanned readings and unanticipated findings and b) 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.