Article Spies like us Jesse Driscoll University of California San Diego, USA Caroline Schuster Australian National University, Australia Abstract 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 ethno- graphic 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. Keywords activism, ethics, fieldwork methods, research design, risk, security bureaucracy There are many parallels between anthropological fieldwork and espionage. Both involve looking, listening, eavesdropping, taking notes, recording conversations, snapping photos, and establishing trusted confidants. We call it participant-observation; they call it spying. (John Borneman and Joseph Masco, ‘Anthropology and the Security State’) ‘It’s going to be tough for her to compete with Somali pirates and Jihadis!’ (overheard on the academic job market, 2014) Ethnography 0(00) 1–20 ! The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1466138117711717 journals.sagepub.com/home/eth Corresponding author: Caroline Schuster, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University, Ellery Crescent #14, ACT 2601, Australia. Email: caroline.schuster@anu.edu.au