The Laura Boulton collection's history includes disputes between the collector and various institutions, and among and within the institutions as well, about the extent and nature of its contents. Through repatriation, the cultural and scholarly value of archives like Boulton's, this chapter suggests ways to move ethnomusicology forward as an ethical as well as scholarly enterprise, by confronting the moral obligations the discipline has incurred. The diversity of Boulton's sources, representing hundreds of different performers, dance, cultural traditions, communities, and languages, of which Boulton's knowledge was uniformly superficial at best, further hinders assessment of the collection as a scholarly or public resource. The recordings and films Boulton had made were her only claim to significance as an ethnomusicologist. Musical archives are only meaningful, only valuable for any purpose at all, when they are embedded in and actualize networks of forward-looking reciprocity. Their value in a history of world music is inseparable, morally and ethically, from such reciprocity.