* Take for example the ambitious and comprehensive corpus of Pierre Bourdieu, which makes visible through an elegant and complex framework a kind of politics of value and status that could appropriately be understood in a paranoid atmosphere and through conspirational causation by social actors caught in games that they hardly understand in terms of their larger stakes (something that Bourdieu’s framework purports to describe – something unaccessible to the embedded practical consciousness of actors). In Distinction (1989), particularly, class conspiracy seems to be behind the hierarchy in the habitus of taste. There is conceivably a paranoid atmosphere for someone who wants to understand the prestige of cultural forms without the models or frameworks to do so, but when that someone also knowingly believes that behind these forms are cynical and systematic class games of self-interest. In the face of impenetrable works of culture that are nonetheless marked with prestige, the petit bourgeois experiences a paranoid moment well within the limits of reason. While never explicitly conceived in such terms by Bourdieu, the paranoid style is thus a reasonable mode of social thought either for those experiencing the hierarchy of taste or for those theorists trying to explain in with Bourdieu’s conceptual scheme.
With regard specifically to the discipline of anthropology, both of the press reviewers of this manuscript, who are anthropologists themselves, had very interesting points to make about the practices of this discipline in relation to paranoia. John Borneman notes that effect on explicit moral economy in which anthropology operates of antropologists not having been that much concerned with the cold-war context of their work. As he says, “I think something could be made of the fact that most anthropologists have been concerned with colonialism and not the cold war, and have therefore had an easy time using realist styles of reporting and critique. (How bad we were back then!) If they had been more concerned with the cold war, the modes of reporting would have been more reflexive, less confident, and perhaps more paranoid.”
The other press reviewer makes the very interesting point that the ordinary experience of quite conventional ethnography (whether in contexts of colonialism or the cold war) has often involved charges and suspicion among their subjects that anthropologies were spies of some sort. A kind of paranoia thus has frequently attached to the very process of initiation of standard fieldwork, and in some unfortunate cases has plagued it to its very end. By extension, then, it is even interesting to speculate about the often unreflected-on paranoid dimensions of the fieldworklike interview situations that have produced the pieces if this volume (but see [Douglas] Holmes’s piece [Tactical Thuggery: National Socialism in the East End of London], where the atmosphere of suspicion and deceit in the interview is palpable).
– Introduction, in Paranoia within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation (1999), pp. 10-1