For some time now, anthropologists working in rural Morocco have found themselves rubbing ethnographic shoulders with a variety of development professionals and local cultural experts. Amazigh/Berber activists have been particularly committed to pursuing areas of traditional anthropological knowledge production: collecting genealogies, transcribing oral narratives, recording rituals, and preserving material artifacts. Concerned with the survival of their endangered language and culture, these activists have returned to the colonial ethnological and philological archive to establish a baseline for Berber language and culture before Arabization. In this paper, I explore the convergences and divergences between the epistemologies, practices, and politics of activists and anthropologists. Drawing on my own recent fieldwork in the southeastern Ghéris valley, I discuss the dilemmas of having one's research presence and findings appropriated for activist political concerns, the practical opportunities and limitations such appropriation entails, and the potential conflicts that can arise when the ideological commitments of anthropologists and activists prove to be incompatible. Such tensions and negotiations point to the ways that all ethnography is ultimately a collective production and challenge the conceit of the anthropologist as an autonomous researcher.