Researchers who have compiled firsthand information from field studies among various populations are under increasing pressure to archive field notes collected in conjunction with their research. This is especially the case for those of us who did research during colonial times, prior to the changes wrought by globalization and the dispersal of so many once relatively stationary populations. Such field notes often contain precious and increasingly rare or unique accounts of traditional customs, social mores, language use, folklore, and other aspects of experience that have not yet made their way into publications. However, field notes by themselves, when isolated from other sources that have a bearing on the circumstances in which the notes were recorded, can be quite misleading insofar as they fail to provide sufficient context for in-depth ethnographic and historical understandings (see Mauthner, Parry, and Backett-Milburn 1998 for a discussion of the epistemological issues involved). When materials from other sources-from archives, museums, newspapers, magazines, published and unpublished missionary and explorer accounts, among others-are added, they can greatly enrich collections and make it much easier for members of studied communities as well as scholars to gain insights into social and cultural histories.But the contexts of archives, particularly the motivations and aims behind collections, must also be considered, because they influence what are considered appropriate materials for archiving as well as the form archival collections take. For example, a good case has been made that governmental (or quasi-governmental) archives established during colonial times were shaped to conform to the colonial project (Stoler 2002). They were often intended as repositories of information of value to colo-