This passage from Clifford Geertz’s essay, “From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding” has been become a landmark for me:

In short, accounts of other peoples’ subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to more-than-normal capacities for ego effacement and fellow feeling. … Whatever accurate or half-accurate sense one gets of what one’s informants are, as the phrase goes, really like … comes from the ability to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems. …  Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem — than it is like achieving communion.

This presents an alternative both to the scientific understanding of human beings (objective observation and measurement of individual and collective behaviors and responses), and the romantic “empathic” ideal of learning to see from the informant’s perspective, or to “go native”.