3 ideas
Anthropology is the one discipline trained to enter a society whose rules are unknown without assuming its own rules apply there, so it is the right instrument for meeting an alien culture. Military or diplomatic protocols assume the other side shares the logic of power, negotiation and reciprocity. Those protocols fail as soon as that logic is absent.
Long stretches where nothing happens are how fieldwork actually proceeds. They are when trust builds, routines become visible and the observer stops distorting what they observe. Treating that silence as failure pushes the fieldworker to force an interaction, and a forced interaction can wreck the relationship the waiting was building.
The worst mistakes in contact come from the observer's unexamined assumptions, not from a lack of information. Observers assume that a simple material life means a simple mind, that silence means hostility or indifference, and that familiar gestures carry familiar meanings. A culture that 'defies human assumptions' shows the observer where their own categories stop working, so each misreading is evidence about the observer as much as about the observed.