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Conducting fieldwork for a project about the materiality of suspicion in today’s Egypt sounds topical, relevant and exciting, but fear can touch researchers as well as their subjects. In this essay, I work to understand my embodied experience in the field in a broader perspective by exploring how suspicion can affect fieldworkers in an era when suspicion is global. My goal is to put forward some elements scholars should be aware of before heading into extraordinarily difficult field sites, elements that can influence methodology as well as analysis. Research in suspicious fields can be transformative in both amplifying and destructive ways. I begin with an account from my 2017–2018 fieldwork in Cairo as part of a collaborative research project with Mark LeVine of the University of California, Irvine, and Eric Trovalla and Ulrika Trovalla at the University of Uppsala. Building on ethnographic data from settings where turmoil …