Just a bit of soul searching in the light of responses to my book.

Not a particularly in depth set of thoughts here, more just a mulling 
over ideas.

I recently wrote a book on the history of the Pagan revival in a history 
of ideas approach ie how the images associated with witchcraft developed 
into the modern array of representations we see in today's pagan 
revival.  Being out there with public responses and main stream media 
interviews etc is somewhat new to me in this respect and I am trying to 
come to terms with it professionally and personally. 

I've had a rather large burst of commentary of 3 kinds.  Firstly I've 
had a lot of  the "this is so fantastic and so needed to be written and 
is fair to all sides"  response from reconstructionists.  Secondly I've 
had a lot perjorative "this is evil approach your just like the b--tch 
Tania Luhrman" from the more new agey and feminist oriented neo-Pagans.  
(Indeed I've been pejoratively linked to Tania Lurhman, Ronald Hutton 
and Talcott Parson's in this.  Funnily enough I really like Hutton and 
Luhrman).  Finally, I've had a few local  initiated Alexandrian and 
Gardnerian Wiccan's have generally come up to me and said something 
along the lines of I agree with this but really disagreed with that and 
wanted a discussion with me on it whcih I am more than happy to do.  I 
had a lot of really informative and entertaining to and fro debates this 
way lately.  (I've also had a range of responses from Christians of the 
informed intellectual kind to rather right wing manichaen diatribes 
about Satanism.)

This had me thinking about my own predilections and how this emerges in 
my writing.  I  strongly lean towards  reconstructionism as a 
practitioner and to be soul searchingly honest a lot of this comes about 
socially through loving the gatherings  and having these fantastic in 
depths discussions on Saxon, Greek or what have you history with people 
I find I see ideologically, historically and culturally very eye to eye 
with.  Conversely, I tend to find myself feeling very irritated and 
tired at more fluffy gatherings where I can't help myself but start 
picking holes in the historical representations and becoming very 
wearied by primma donna posturing, a lot of blatant fabrications 
personally and collectively and a somewhat reactionary response to the 
sue of supernaturalism in social game playing which personally brings up 
scars from a pentecostal/fundamentalist upbringing I would rather not 
revisit.  I've found, personally, the local traditionalist initiated 
wiccans and reconstructionists seem to be much less prone to the more 
negative aspects of pagan gatherings I've participated in.  Of course 
this largely group and personality dependent as there are plenty of 
strange recons and trad' wiccans out there I've just been fortunate 
enough to not have much to do with them. 

This kind of personal influence is something I've seen very strongly in 
works, particularly anthropologically studies.  It reminds me of Julie 
Stephen's commentary on the 60's about the reluctance of people to 
discuss or bring up negative issues of serious critique of events which 
connected with people emotionally.  This is something I've long found 
frustrating in contemporary Pagan studies where you'll get lines like 
"People are free to play with the past as they will to make empowering 
narratives" and not dealing with the experience of being stuck in a room 
with a bunch of pathological liars on supreme supernaturalist ego 
trips.  Its interesting reflecting on the way i do the same thing albeit 
with a different community and what that means in tersm of trying to 
engage in research.  I don't think the whole dissolution of the 
etic/emic divide and giving up on historical objectivity all together is 
a resolution to this but a reflective theoretical approach to one's own 
analysis is quite beneficial.  I quite admire Dianne Purkiss in this 
regard as I think she does it exceedingly well.

Its funny though on an odd note I was engaged (outside of my work 
activities) assisting a friend doing medieval classes at schools (ie 
have all my Armour on and do some metal weapon displays etc and talk 
about medieval law and punishment etc) and a heathen friend of mine 
starts off with a long speach about our heathen ancestry and so on 
leading to some comments hovering on the border of racism regarding the 
English and non-English students about their ancestry etc and then 
thanked me as Dr David Waldron and I instantly had the thought something 
along the lines of "Sh-te what have you just professionally associated 
me with!!@!"

Anyway to cut to the chase I was wondering if people had any insights on 
this sort of thing and your own experiences with differentiating between 
your academic and practitioners hat and your own biases and even dealing 
with being a author who gets a lot of people of facebook and email 
sending you many many commentaries etc good and bad etc.

Cheers
David