ABSTRACT
The conundrum that Peter Winch presented, of the folk rules vs. the social scientists’ rules, was primarily a problem in concept formation. The conundrum holds not only for anthropologists studying “exotic natives” but for social scientists in their home societies. In the case of exotic natives, the problem concerns the contribution professionals make in modernization or development. The demand for objectivity, the separation of observation and reporting from the researchers’ wishes, which is so essential for the development of science, becomes the demand for separation of thinking from feeling. In the United States, feminist research and teaching in the academy grew out of the mass movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The collective activities of folk and professionals meet in the local research setting. In local settings, whether laboratory or field, professionals “interrogate nature,” or they “interrogate their subjects” in the sites they have chosen.
