Introduction Many historical archives of primary materials sponsored by museums, libraries, and universities are now enriching the web. Some anthropologists are also beginning to archive their data on the web. The majority of these are folklore archives, perhaps the most obvious candidate for public archiving. These innovations prompt two questions: How do we use such archives in teaching undergraduates? And are there other possibilities for archiving ethnographic documents? Unlike historians, anthropologists create their own documents through field research. These documents take a variety of forms: notes from formal and informal interviews; notes on observed public behavior such as political ceremonies and religious rites; transcripts of texts such as folklore, myth, genealogies, ethnohistories. "Documents" also invariably include many hundreds or thousands of slides and photos. They may also include sound and visual records. These documents tend to repose in a liminal world of the anthropologist’s own file drawers. Some of it will be "written up" and published in books and journals. Some of it is too sensitive to ever be seen by anyone. Most of it, this valuable "raw data," has been destined never to be seen or made available to other scholars or to students—until the arrival of the Web. Now there is the opportunity to publish as archived documents much of what most anthropologists gather, which we could call their "archivable documents." These documents, if made public, could be used not just by other scholars at other universities, but can be used in teaching our own students how to conduct interviews, record data, and then "interrogate" the data through careful, analytic scrutiny of this primary material. Moreover, as students conduct their own research projects, they can create their own archives and learn to analyze these records in the same way as their instructors do. As this data is posted in the local web workplace, students can examine each other’s data and together they can troubleshoot and collaborate at producing valid analyses.   Why Is This Good Learning For Undergraduates? Of course, undergrads will continue to read finished ethnographies, but in the reading of primary documents there is a benefit that has gone unexamined largely because no one ever thinks of having students encounter them. In primary documents, you hear real people speaking, expressing anger, joy, uncertainty, self-justification, bitterness; telling stories about themselves, each other, their culture. In finished ethnographies, you hear the anthropologist’s voice. In primary documents, you hear the indigenous voice. Students can get closer. As ethnographic film allows a closeness not possible in the written ethnography (actually seeing living people in context), reading selected portions of primary field documents allows a more extensive listening to the voice of the speaker. The anthropologist is still not out of the picture—she has posed the question, he is recording the responses, the event may still be contrived to a certain extent—but students come closer to the informant. They sit beside the ethnographer, hearing responses, puzzling along with the professional. A second benefit in reading primary documents is that they are unprocessed. Even very short clips from interview transcripts may, upon close scrutiny, generate a dozen or more crucial questions about the culture. The student is invited into the stage of querying, questioning, trying to understand, positing interpretations, feeling the uncertainty, wanting more information.   Construction of Special Purpose Archives Typically, anthropologists’ fieldnotes contain a wide range of materials on varied topics. Much nucleates around specific research interests of the anthropologist, while other materials are adventitious: wrong turns, unexpected events, topics that ended up going nowhere, but might have under different circumstances. We could call these "nucleated" and "open-ended" documents. Nucleated sets probably ended in publication. Open-ended sets probably didn’t, perhaps because we never got enough data to feel confident about committing any sort of analysis to writing or because the data didn’t lend itself to contemporary theoretical concerns. Both sorts of documents can be useful to our students. Open-ended document sets allow our students to get the feel for the looseness, the sometimes unnerving openness of the investigative process. Where does this fit? Where’s this going? What’s significant here? How should I proceed to develop this avenue that appears to be opening up? (Sometimes: how do I get a publication out of this?) Assignments using some of these documents could involve students with setting up hypothetical next steps, often summarizing where the data had led so far. Who should be interviewed next? What additional data might expand the data at hand in a way that would make it conceptually significant, or allow closure? They might be asked to design a research proposal that would carry on where these notes left off. Nucleated document sets will be those we have more confidence in. They are likely to be richer, and to have resulted in publications already. Various kinds of activities can be imagined. Students could be shown a chapter or article along with the set of documents the article was built on. They might first be asked to sketch a possible analysis of those documents, then shown the final paper that did result. It should then be possible to see what else the ethnographer brings to the data—e.g., a theoretical framework and focused questions. Of course, that analysis may not be the only possible outcome; students might generate alternative valid readings of the data, and that, too, would be a valuable learning experience. In fact, using these documents in this way heightens the reality of ethnography as "readings" of data and texts.   Example of Student Exercise Utilizing a Document Set Students are given three documents from fieldnotes. One informant is a young wife [Putul], the other two are middle aged men [Bhoganath, Binayanand]. All are from the same society and are talking about marriage arrangements of near relatives, except for the young wife, who is talking about her own. All three excerpts relate to perennial topics in kinship studies: patrilineality, marriage exchange, hypergamy, dowry, disputes among kinsmen, patriarchal control over women, and status preoccupations. The document sets might be accompanied in the classroom by a few slides in which the speakers may be seen. (On the Web you might decide to show these faces only if it is a closed site; but alternative images might show village scenes, feasts or weddings, or other appropriate visualizations). The instructor offers some background information on each of the three informants. Students then read the three documents, stopping to "unpack" each one before proceeding to the next. What is implied about social rules, about cultural values in each segment? What can be inferred from this data? How does each speaker "slant" their comments? Do they accept their social world as given, expecting others to abide by the same rules? Or are they critical of the system? What strategies are they playing by? How are these social rules different from those which govern us? How are they similar? What do these particular excerpts tell us about how patrilineality works? About why people marry? About status games? It will be evident than even in very short excerpts there is an extraordinary amount of potential insight into culture, anthropological method, interpretive moves, and our common humanity. Such a teaching strategy is, perhaps, unusually "microscopic." This is culture in the detail, rather than culture writ large, as students experience a whole ethnography. But we should go back and forth between these views; this is what the anthropologist must do in practicing her discipline; it should also be what we expect of, and offer to, the student of anthropology.   Why Develop an Archive? Any one of us can prepare a few handouts from our fieldnotes, as the attachments demonstrate. But each one of us has only done fieldwork in one or a few places, and this gives us little choice to offer our students by way of comparison. Assembling an archive of such documents, especially if attached to a related slide archive, gives us the opportunity of expanding comparative exercises. The examples I have shown here could be useful in Anthropology 103 and 239. If we had some document sets on religious practices in the various cultures where Chico anthropologists have worked, the Anthropology 40 classes could make use of them. Any number of document sets could be utilized at some point in Anthropology 283. Beyond these immediate reasons, there is the opportunity for new forms of communication offered by the Web. The complaint that there are millions of websites but no significant content out there in Cyberspace is still true, but becoming less so, as the full potential is grasped and new opportunities are seized. There are still surprisingly few good anthropological sites; most of them remain lists of other sites. One surfs to list after list after list.   What We Want from You We are proposing an experimental site to which each member of the cultural faculty will contribute one document set. By "document set" we mean a set of 5 to 20 documents, presumably each of them fairly brief (a screen or two of information) along with some illustrative images which might themselves become objects of study. (Have you looked at any of your slides close up on a computer screen?!) We will provide one EthnoLab Intern to do the technical work for you. They can scan text, scan images, format data for the web, and launch it into the EthnoLab Archives. All you have to do is select the material, sort it however you want it, and sit down to a conference with the intern. They will then produce a draft web-site for you to examine and edit. After you have approved their work, we will launch it. For an example of how such a document set might look, you might check out my site-in-progress: "Whom Can I Marry? Conversations with the Genealogist." This is all we ask at the present time. After we have assembled a number of document sets, we will evaluate the utility of such a project in order to decide whether we should expand the effort. Thanks in advance for your cooperation.