Steven Sampson

Abstract: Field research in politically authoritarian contexts poses special problems for the ethnographic project of pursuing intimacy and trust. During my fieldwork in communist Romania, both up to my denial of entry in 1985, and during my subsequent public activities dealing with Romania up to 1989, I was various surveillance by Romanian security organs, who also interrogated and harassed by informants and friends in the country. Ethnographic fieldwork is supposed to be about becoming involved in the lives of the people we study. But in this particular context, I argue the single-minded pursuit of intimacy needs to be balanced by the need for distance and detachment.