Each presentation follows the paper trail of a specific case study from Southeast Asia in order to illuminate the history of information management, interpretation, and exchange. Matthew Reeder explores how the Thai court gathered, translated, and interpreted the vernacular know-how of local experts to understand miraculous or magical phenomena beyond the walls of the court. As authorities produced reports, petitions, and correspondence, their efforts to manage—and produce knowledge about—the kingdom’s “unnatural” resources took a bureaucratic form. Genie Yoo explores the shadow archive of a nineteenth-century colonial ethnography from Indonesia to untangle how an Indigenous intermediary’s interpretations of local customs were translated, reinterpreted, and integrated into a Dutch colonial account. Rather than tracing a unidirectional process from archival source to printed book, she emphasizes subtle changes of interpretation on both ends of knowledge formation and collection at a time of emerging discourses about race and ethnicity. Delving into the historical imbrication of anthropology and law, Jonathan Baldoza reconstructs the makings of the voluminous Beyer-Holleman Collection in the Philippines under U.S. colonial rule, tracing the impact of student-gathered ethnographies on customary law and cultural documentation. He emphasizes the agency of university students as active negotiators of cultural change through their documentation of “unwritten” laws practiced in different parts of the Philippine archipelago. Finally, Cindy Nguyen investigates the French colonial infrastructure that governed the social life of the Cambodian library and its visitors in Phnom Penh. She demonstrates how a careful reading of library classification systems, reader visits, and statistics about book collections and usage can illuminate a history of the everyday social lives of local readers against the backdrop of changing information bureaucracies and colonial surveillance.