Scholarship on ethnographic methods has long concerned itself with the uneven power dynamic between researchers and the people they study. However, literature exploring this dynamic routinely assumes that the power imbalance favors the researcher. Based on interviews with researchers who conducted fieldwork in Turkey, I find that in practice, researchers routinely express suspicion of their interlocutors and a sense of generalized vulnerability, suggesting an inversion--or at best, a negation--of this widely-recognized power imbalance. I trace this phenomenon to shifts in the political field in Turkey, which have upended long-recognized power relationships over the past 20 years. I discuss how volatility in the political field contributes to insecurity and suspicion in contexts where power imbalances do not clearly favor the researcher. I discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for understanding the effects of instability on social research, and the methodological implications for scholars conducting research in contexts defined by political instability.