![]() As IRB restrictions have grown tighter, the consequences have become more dire. Nearly every ethnographer has observed the growing reach and increasingly uncomfortable power of the IRB. The article ultimately shows that despite the fact that the IRGC attempts to control the narrative about its activities, there are ways in which its members exercise agency by using the very language of surveillance to make space for their stories. The paper pushes at the boundaries of what data collection looks like in such spaces, and how control over the researcher and her informants are attempted. Specifically, what does it mean to build rapport and gain trust within a highly securitized space such as this? What happens when the researcher is a potential “national security” threat, and how is that defined and enacted in everyday interactions in the field? Given that anthropologists have tended to have an affinity with the group and community they work with, this paper explores what it means to conduct research among a group of men in charge of surveillance, intelligence-gathering, and citizen suppression in the country. Indeed, such questions saturate social life at large and hence, necessarily, ethnographic approaches to its study.īased on ethnographic research in Iran among the country's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and it’s Basij militia, this paper explores what it means to gain access to these militarized groups in order to conduct long-term research. While conducting ethnographic research under a pseudonym brings into exceptionally sharp relief the intensive metapragmatic labor entailed in positioning oneself in the field, I argue that the questions it raises are of a more general nature for ethnographic research. Instead, I ask, how do we draw our interlocutors into webs of complicity as we withhold or obfuscate information in our transactions with them? How, in turn, do they call upon us to reciprocate by upholding their own dissimulations? In particular, I look at four problems of identity and transparency in ethnographic fieldwork, which I call coherence, performativity, secrecy, and complicity. I argue that such ethical standards presume an untenable notion of the speaking subject by granting the ethnographer a fixity and objectivity that, furthermore, we ordinarily deny our interlocutors. How have recent political developments impacted the practice and ethics of ethnographic research, especially given the growing anthropological interest in studying the far right? Drawing on my own experience as a researcher under a false name, in this article I reconsider the ethical imperatives of full disclosure and informed consent in the context of ethnographic fieldwork. ![]() 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. 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. ![]() 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.
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