"But the fact that, as you say, breastfeeding discussions are 99% personal anecdote surely suggests that this is an area that people are not responding to in a considered academic manner"
People generally don't respond to this with a discussion of the wider issues (except here on mumsnet) because there's great resistence to acknowledging that women's success and failure with breastfeeding is anything other than a purely personal thing.
I can tell you though, that EVERYONE who's got any signficant involvement with this issue at a professional level spends a lot of time thinking about, reading about and discussing it.
Do you honestly think a discussion that goes beyond the strictly personal doesn't contribute anything at all useful to the debate? Talking about the cultural issues that shape our experiences and are knowledge of breastfeeding are CRUCIAL to understanding how we've arrived at a place where the MAJORITY of women are stopping breastfeeding before they want to, and where the majority of babies are only fed for a few weeks.
"across as though you are exasperated and think I'm utterly dense"
I don't think and haven't implied that you're in any way dense. I'm just exasperated at you being so judgemental about widening the debate beyond the domain of people's personal experiences of this subject.
"and that as I said earlier, theorising and instructing doesn't seem to be working any better in getting breastfeeding rates up"
Well that's because the people who have the most impact on mum's chances of bf success are exactly those people who have the least knowledge and understanding of these things - ie your poorly trained mw and maternity assistant on the postnatal ward, and the friends and relatives of women who are struggling to feed their babies once they get back into the community. They not only don't have the practical skills to help mums with bf, but they don't have enough of a cultural perspective on their knowledge of bf to know just how much damage they're doing. In other words - these are the very people who know nothing of the theory or the wider debate and they're the people doing the most damage.
I think the point I want to make is that you need to think about BOTH theory AND personal experience if you want to really make sense of things. You seem to be implying that if your experience doesn't fit with the theory (in so far as you seem to see 'theory' as a narrow set of beliefs and 'rules' that are set in stone - this is not the way I look at it) then it somehow disproves the theory or trivialises the personal experience.
"but I really bridle against someone telling me they know my own body and my own experience better than me"
But I didn't imply or say you had got things wrong. You have taken every thing I have said completely at face value as though it was an absolute, and as though it was a personal challenge to your experience. Are we not allowed to generalise AT ALL in relation to this topic because someone is always going to pop up and say 'well it didn't happen like that for me - therefore you're talking rubbish'!
"Breastfeeding is unique in our human experience in that you are connecting with another being which is totally dependent on you in a physical and profound way. And that is why some women don't want to do it, or not for very long."
Well I agree with this statement completely. But I don't see how it can be used as a reflection or criticism of anything I've said in my posts.