upset the natives

— I have learned the most about culture when I have been involved as a consultant in trying to help an organization deal with specific issues on which it needed some help. The issue here is that in the normal flow of things cultural data are unintentionally concealed; the "natives" are not conscious of what it is they take for granted. The researcher then has the problem of how to observe phenomena that occur at that level without, at the same time, upsetting the natives by delving into areas that may be defined by them as private, or even unwittingly intervening in those cultures by raising questions that the natives may never have thought about.