Lloyd A. Fallers (1925-1974) was a leading Chicago University anthropologist specialized in East African legal and political systems. Almost completely forgotten today is that he later chose Turkey as his second geographical area of study and worked on Turkish political and religious lifeworld from the early 1960s until he died in 1974. His illness and untimely death at a very young age prevented Fallers from publishing his findings based on two semesters of living and teaching in Konya and Ankara, a year-long ethnography in Edremit, and several short visits. Apart from largely unnoticed two articles and a book chapter, Fallers’ Turkey work has so far remained untouched in the special collection archives of the University of Chicago Library. Based on his unpublished letters, speeches and articles in the archives as well as my oral history interviews, this paper unearths behind-the-scene politics of ethnography in Turkey in 1965-70 through the experiences of Fallers and his students. Fallers conducted fieldwork in exceptional times. The world turned upside down between his three-month stay in Konya in the fall of 1964 and his fieldwork in Edremit in 1968-69. At home, Chicago University was shaken by student mobilization, on the one hand, and the discipline of anthropology was coming under critique for its involvement in Western imperialist policies, on the other. In his new field site, Turkish-American relationship almost suddenly retrogressed from its golden age into an atmosphere of distrust, while the Leftist movement powerfully came in sight on university campuses and streets, with its strong anti-American dimension. In this conjecture, Fallers struggled on many fronts. Along with his student Michael Meeker, he strove against the Turkish bureaucracy for fieldwork permissions while also criticizing American policy in Turkey which he even disputed with Ambassador Robert Komer. He wrote on the futility of Vietnam War yet disapproved the radical student movements. He was impressed by the sophistication of Turkish social scientists but stood aloof from their Marxist tendencies. He was deeply sensitive about fieldwork ethics; however, he never took seriously the reflexive discussions in anthropology about its imperialist complicity. Finally, in his non-academic speeches, he tried to accommodate his passion for modern science with his devotion to Christianity. He was simultaneously progressive and conservative, patriotic and universalist, modernist and traditionalist. Fallers’ story challenges ideological oppositions in Cold War narratives and underlines instead paradoxes and uncertainties in the heart of Cold War imaginaries.