Exploring ethnographic encounters that challenge anthropology’s deepest commitments, this book develops a diagnostic framework for situations in which collaboration becomes ethically impossible, solidarity risks complicity, and reflexivity intensifies rather than resolves the tensions of fieldwork. Drawing on research with far-right communities in London and on HPV and COVID vaccination in Dublin, it examines the limits of empathy, dialogue, and taking participants seriously when the familiar becomes strange within the anthropologist’s own society. Rather than offering prescriptions or straightforward resolutions, the book opens new pathways for researchers studying difficult subjects.