ABSTRACT
Thus social scientists are counselled in textbook after textbook never to ‘go native’. Some of the key terms of science indicate the required ‘proper’ stance for researchers-detachment and not involvement, objectivity and not subjectivity, rationality and not emotionality, and so on. Recently I asked a group of graduate feminist researchers what ‘going native’ meant and what there was about it that made it taboo.1 The majority answer was that it was a personal involvement which prevented the kind of detachment they saw as essential to critical feminist analysis. My response was two-fold. First, if detachment really was necessary then no one
would be able to think critically and analytically about things in which they are involved, and many people patently do achieve this. Second, and perhaps more importantly, feminists are women, and so involved and ‘native’, and yet at the same time also think critically and analytically about challenging and changing both the category ‘Women’ and the actuality of women’s lives and experiences. ‘Going native’, indeed ‘being native’ as an ontological state, prevents neither critical thought nor analysis.
