go native meaning: definition, quotations

go native

verb

Idiomatic To adopt the lifestyle or outlook of local inhabitants, especially when dwelling in a colonial region.

[…]for St. Xavier's looks down on boys who ‘go native all-together.’ One must never forget that one is a Sahib, and that some day, when examinations are passed, one will command natives.1900 December – 1901 October, Rudyard Kipling, chapter VII, in Kim, London: Macmillan and Co., published 1901, →OCLC, page 177:
He was an extraordinary figure, with his red beard and matted hair, and his great hairy chest. His feet were horny and scarred, so that I knew he went always bare foot. He had gone native with a vengeance.1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter 53, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC:

3 more examples

Yet while Gauguin went native, taking teenage mistresses, wearing local costumes and building his own wooden hut, his ultimate purpose was to impress the art world back home.2003 October 14, Alan Riding, “The Colors of Paradise As Imagined by Gauguin”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
In the case of diplomats, the State Department has had to wrestle with criticisms that regional specialists—say, those who concentrate on the Arab world and speak Arabic—will suffer from “clientitis”: the disease of “going native,” of developing such sympathy for the people and culture of a given region that one begins to represent its interest to America rather than vice versa.2011, John Lenczowski, Full Spectrum Diplomacy and Grand Strategy: Reforming the Structure and Culture of U.S. Foreign Policy, Lexington Books, →ISBN, page 108:
Although I have tried to avoid bias, I may have failed. For example, I may have "gone native," a visitor seduced by the charms of a new exotic world.2018, Robin Hanson, The Age of Em, page 49:

Idiomatic Of a contractor or consultant, to begin working directly as an employee for a company and cease to work through a contracting firm or agency.

[…] we had to stop putting job-hunting colonels in charge of AFPRO detachments in the plants. It almost always happened that they went native and began to represent the contractor rather than the government.1989, Arthur Ernest Fitzgerald, The Pentagonists, page 204:

Related terms: clientitis