We are not, or at least I am not, seeking either to become natives (a compromised word in any case) or to mimic them

We are not, or at least I am not, seeking either to become natives (a compromised word in any case) or to mimic them. Only romantics or spies would seem to find point in that. We are seeking, in the widened sense of the term in which it encompasses very much more than talk, to converse with them, a matter a great deal more difficult, and not only with strangers, than is commonly recognized. — Clifford Geertz on ethnography.