Dammit, I was just going out to buy some vacuum cleaner bags, and there's another post to respond to:

"I do not think one can attribute all scepticism about the dogmatic positions and narratives of some folklorists to Dave Harker. One of the first things I ever learned about folk song collectors was that Cecil Sharp altered the words to take out the rude bits."

There were certainly spirited disagreements amongst the early song collectors, but Harker's was the first to stick the boot into the methods of all of them. However, Sharp, Baring-Gould and others had little choice but to bowdlerize songs for publication, given the mores of the time, but unexpurgated copies survive in Sharp's notes, at least. Unfortunately Harker chose to exaggerate the extent of Sharp's editorial tampering by simply inventing examples that didn't stand up to scrutiny (read C. J . Bearman)

"As I understand it, Harker would call this 'mediation' and this is a valid term. As I have said, Hillier uses it in connection with 2nd wave revivalist research. Put simply, his point appears to be that the more involved a 'researcher' gets with his or her subjects the greater are the chances of 'mediation' ie the selection of bits and pieces of data that fit with the needs/interests/philosophy of the researchers."

Even if one accepts Harker's concept of 'mediation', I would disagree with Hillery's rather throwaway remarks about it in the context of the 'second wave' of collection. According to Harker, 'mediation' consisted of placing the collector between the source and the intended recipients (i.e. the bourgeoisie), so that the falsification of the source material could not be challenged. In this view, for instance, Sharp's reluctance to use sound recordings (to which he actually had several coherent objections) were part of a cunning plot to prevent independent analysis of his allegedly unreliable notations. I think a lot of this stuff is conspiracy theory, but even if you believe it, the greater transparency and attention to context of the 'second wave' runs counter to the narrative of mystifying and obscuring the original source material. I don't follow the logic that a researcher who spends more time with his source is therefore more likely to misrepresent the material - quite the opposite, I'd have thought.

"For a sophisticated discussions of this sort of skill in the context of folk music, people might go to some of the work of David Atkinson, for example."

I am indeed familiar with Dave's work (he's one of my oldest friends), but he's primarily a textual scholar working with printed sources. He's not a field collector, though some of his work (e.g. The English Traditional Ballad) uses the work of collectors, as well as his own research into historical context. Methinks you're comparing apples with oranges here!