This paper focuses on the establishment of two types of archive by an anthropologist. First, the digital archive where different types of physical materials (Copper plate, Palm leaves, paper documents and objects) in the custody of various households in the villages of Kongu nadu and Kallar nadu in south India are digitized in situ. Second, is the establishment of a physical archive of Science and Technology for the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
Involvement in building both these archives exposed the researcher to a new dimension of ethnographic research where, the process of identifying and accessing the primary documents itself was very much an ethnographic study made possible by the methodology of ethnography. During the archive building the anthropologist had to interact with various stakeholders, who are either record creators or inheritors. Whoever they are, they have an attachment to the records, which they do not want to part with for anybody, irrespective of whether they knew the content of their records or not. How the anthropologist maneuvered through the challenges in sourcing, digitizing and organizing the records from these two types of archives forms the basis of the paper. The records in these archives will definitely contribute to the research not only for anthropologists but also to other social scientists. But how does anthropological knowledge construction help build the archive; how are materials to be archived selected and how are they organized; what aspects inform the criteria for this? These will be some of the questions explored in this paper.
