Probably a Spy: Managing Suspicion of Espionage in Ethnographic Fieldwork

Ethnographers are often suspected of being spies. Existing scholarship highlights how these suspicions can pose meaningful risks to ethnographers but offers little insight regarding how to effectively respond when they arise. Based on interviews with 34 ethnographers who were suspected of spying during fieldwork in Turkey, I examine the nature and methodological implications of ethnography’s interpretation as espionage. The ethnographers I spoke with recounted events spanning more than four decades that took place in communities ranging from rural villages to urban workplaces across each of the seven major regions of Turkey. Despite wide variation in ethnographers’ positionality relative to their interlocutors and the social and historical context of the fieldwork, clear patterns emerged regarding both the nature of ethnographers’ experiences of being interpreted as spies and the implications that this interpretation had for their research. I find that ethnographers became aware that they were suspected of spying through two types of encounters—accusations and questioning—each of which was associated with distinct interactional dynamics. Accusations were associated with implicit or explicit threats and functioned as a form of social control. Questioning was associated with sense-making and reflected an absence of common frameworks for interpreting the activities of ethnographers. Effective responses to suspicions of espionage differed based on which of these interactional dynamics were most salient. Synthesizing ethnographers’ accounts with scholarship on social cognition, I offer methodological insights for managing suspicion during fieldwork.