Spies like us

The discipline of anthropology recoils instinctively at the idea that its researchers' labor might contribute to the national security state; other disciplines celebrate the same contributions as evidence of policy impact. In this article, we examine the seductions of espionage for professionally vulnerable (untenured) researchers that employ ethnographic methods but are operating in the shadow of market incentives and the Global War on Terror. We define “extreme fieldwork” as a research design likely to yield the kinds of data that Price identifies as “Dual Use Anthropology.” The bulk of our essay is devoted to providing warrants for the claim that there are strong incentives to brand oneself as an “extreme” fieldworker – which may be the post-9/11 equivalent of chasing what Trouillot called the “savage slot.” We argue that for some topics in certain research settings, uncomfortably, the more care and effort one invests in ethnographic best practices, the more likely it is that the researcher will engage in behaviors that could be confused with spycraft.