Then he started to make what I see as an irrelevant (and inaccurate) division between "academics" and non-academics, in order to dismiss "academic" notions.

Maybe I did at that, Gibb - but the divisions are in no way irrelevant, nor yet are they inaccurate. On one hand you have the thing that is being studied, and on the other you have the academics who are studying it. The thing exists quite happily without the academics - as in the case of people singing and playing music as part of their day to day life without realising that what they're doing is Folk Music, or Traditional Music, or Ethnic Music. It's the academics who decide that - then they decide what Folk Music is (and by implication what it isn't), and so they come up with a set of criteria to determine that.

Such criteria however, is just a theory, just as The Folk Process is just a theory. As theories they remain fluid, but somehow they have been seized upon by the Folk Faithful who assume that because they have once enjoyed a degree of academic sanction that they must, therefore, be objectively true. Thus does a theory become a theology - a theology which accounts for much of the reactions we have seen in this thread, by the non-academic folk-faithful carrying the dead weight of redundant theory around with them as if it was fact if only to justify that what they're doing is, therefore, Real Folk Music. We used to see reasoning like that from WAV, who, for all his qualifications in the field of anthropology believed that the only way forward for humanity was the implementation of Ethnic Cleansing. I see similar ideas afoot here, where what is, after all, merely personal taste must be then be justified, indeed sanctified, with respect of what has become the Holy Law of the 1954 Definition - and woe betide the heretic who dares suggest otherwise.

It matters not to me whether the academics at the ICTM still abide by the 1954 Definition or still believe in the fairy tale that is The Folk Process. I used to believe in it myself until I realised there are other far more plausible ways to account for such things (such as individual creativity and vernacular variation, things which still occur, and will keep on occurring as long as people sing songs) - and that consequently once we remove The Folk Process, what we have come to think of as The Tradition might not actually exist beyond the imaginations of those who really, really want it to. Preciousness is all very well, but Fundamentalism is unforgivable. One thing in which there can be no dispute however, is that the music exists, likewise the songs, and what makes it Folk Music is the context in which it occurs and the individual singers and musicians who, whether they believe in the 1954 Definition or not, keep it very much alive simply because it suits them very nicely to do so.