Fieldwork advice has increased and improved over the years. Yet, thebulk of political science fieldwork advice is general; it assumesthat the subject to whom advice is given is simply a politicalscientist—in training, perhaps—with no other salient identities thatmight intercede (but see Mazzei and O'Brien 2005 and the PS 2006fieldwork symposium, The Methodologies of Field Research in theMiddle East, for recent exceptions). Of course in reality it is notjust the fieldwork setting that varies; the relationship of theresearcher to the field matters a great deal—and that may be muchmore dependent on our specific identities than we have previouslycredited. It is not simply the subjects that we study, but us aswell who have to negotiate sometimes sticky issues of race, class,gender, nationality, and so forth.