he field data presently in the possession of an- thropologists and stored by them in archives and libraries should be made more readily accessible. Implicitly, this means sorting out and protecting ownership rights to knowledge recorded in the field notes, sifting out potentially harmful and damaging information and safeguarding future research interests. This is best done by the origi- nal researcher,asarchivists and librarians,or even fellow anthropologists, rarely share the knowl- edge necessary to do this properly.
It is better to plan all this at the start of field- work than put it in place afterward. Therefore, not only the setup of fieldwork, but also the training for fieldwork, should be reviewed in such a way that safeguarding the informants’ interests in the data becomes second nature to anthropologists.
Anthropologists are entrusted to use and to work with other people’s knowledge, but “own- ership”remains limited to what they add as inter- pretation. They have to acknowledge that the communities W i g studied have equal if not greater legitimate rights to the ethnographic ma- terials gathered. These rights are only mitigated by an obhgation to prevent damage deriving from any access provided to the material. If the aca- demic community does not make itself and the data anthropologists gather accessible and ac- countable, it may eventually be forced to do so. B