Really enjoyed Phil's very articulate critique of Fakesong in this thread. I felt exactly the same way (and I'm also a Marxist).

I felt much the same way about The Imagined Village, which I gave up on about 50 pages in. Whoever supervised that particular PhD thesis wasn't doing their job properly, I thought: I got fed up having to look up every footnote expecting to read some kind of support for what was being asserted as fact, only to find the title and publisher of whatever the work was.

And that work was generally by an ethnomusicologist from a completely different country talking about that completely different country's tradition. Purportedly a critique of the English folk revival, it will use any other source talking about any other country's folk music, if it can be used to build up a case.

As it happens, it's unable to make any especially damning inditements of the major collectors (as far as I read, anyway), so its grand claims seem like hyperbole in the main.

As you say Phil, any stick...