Thirty-three years ago, Anna Grimshaw was pulling double duty at an anthropology conference, presenting her work…and selling a pamphlet. She and her colleague, fellow anthropologist Keith Hart (1943-2025), had written something. Perhaps you’d like to read it? 

That pamphlet, Anthropology and the Crisis of the Intellectuals (1993), was the start of Prickly Pear Pamphlets, the seed of Prickly Paradigm Press. Grimshaw didn’t set out to found a press, much less a disruptor in academic publishing, but that’s exactly what she found herself doing throughout PPP’s initial run in the 1990s.

From her home in Maine, where she now creates anthropological films documenting northeast fishing communities, Grimshaw recalled what it was like creating that first PPP release, then Prickly Pear and nine more pamphlets. Dismayed with the conventions of anthropological scholarship and delighted by the initial response to their work, Grimshaw and Hart were convinced that they had stumbled on a format with legs. 

“We were interested in what the pamphlet offered as a way of breaking up some of the conventions by which anthropological ideas were put into circulation,” Grimshaw said.

Grimshaw initially became acquainted with Hart through their shared work for C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian historian, writer, and political activist. Hart was deeply invested in anthropological publishing and convinced it needed a radical change. (He was also an early advocate for the digital potential of publishing. “We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world,” he later wrote in The Memory Bank (2000)). Grimshaw recognized him as  a “maverick.” Their interests lay in different hemispheres of anthropology. She was more interested in individual behaviors, while he was drawn to more abstract systems. But those interests ultimately complemented each other, first in a pamphlet, then in Prickly Pear.

“There weren’t other vehicles for quickly sharing ideas, being provocative, being engaged in anthropology that were serious but wasn’t falling into the delay, peer-reviewed, rather sort of stultifying prose,” Grimshaw said. “What we wanted to do was to persuade people that this kind of pamphleteering work, this kind of producing in this form, could be serious intellectual work.”

For Grimshaw, the pamphlet was the perfect medium for their goals. From a logistical standpoint, pamphlets can be produced fairly quickly, inexpensively, and are comparatively accessible to the standard academic publication. And through an intellectual lens, pamphlets enable authors to unleash their ideas and experiment freely. “They’re not weighed down by the sort of form in which every little piece has to be supported by evidence,” Grimshaw said. “There's a place for all of that, but we were trying to free people up to be more speculative, to be more imaginative, to take more risks.”

Anthropology and the Crisis of the Intellectuals started it all. The pamphlet explored the history of anthropology as a discipline and, more crucially, how anthropology had moved away from meaningful public discourse. The discipline was at a crossroads, as many of its key practices became obsolete in a globalized, post-revolutionary era. Grimshaw and Hart believed anthropology could and should reclaim a place of public prominence. As they wrote in PPP’s very first pamphlet: “This pamphlet is animated by a commitment to rediscovering what was new and radical in anthropology at the turn of the century.”

“It was an attempt to get people to argue back,” Grimshaw said. “The way that history and anthropology were taught, it was just passively given to you rather than really thinking about how the 20th century had shaped the way that particular anthropologists did their work and what compromises were involved.”

They found an enthusiastic audience quickly. Grimshaw and Hart would bring copies of the pamphlet  to anthropology conferences, where they’d set up a nondescript table to sell to attendees. The pamphlet was a hit, in part because they doing more than selling a product — they were opening up a provocative conversation.

“Having something like that generates face-to-face encounters, discussions, conversations, and that’s very satisfying, because so much of academic life is not like that,” Grimshaw said. “Seminars are performance pieces… and academic publications you read in your own private rooms. So this was wholly different. This was sort of spontaneously generating conversation around a table that was just putting out some ideas.”

Spontaneity was key in the early days of PPP — following the success of Anthropology and the Crisis of the Intellectuals, Grimshaw and Hart decided to continue their work to produce an initial series of ten pamphlets. These texts followed no overarching theme, and each was inked by a different author, serving a different purpose. Grimshaw describes the process as “ad-hoc.” She and Hart approached any academic writer that sparked their interest, and they were open to work on any subject.

They started by asking friends to write. Hart was already close with Marshall Sahlins, author of Waiting for Foucault, Still (1993, reissued in 2002) and future publisher for the press, and Marilyn Strathern, author of The Relation (1995). Then they expanded to likeminded academics they admired. Grimshaw and Hart approached Simon Schaeffer, author of From Physics to Anthropology — and Back Again (1994), because they knew he shared their frustrations with the state of anthropology. Grimshaw thinks those initial authors were attracted to opportunity to work differently. “So much of academia is against energy, it’s always about doing things properly, making sure you’ve got things in place,” she said“You know, there’s a role for that, but there is also this role for a more spontaneous, experimental dimension to how we think and do our work.”

The ten initial pamphlets also included a series titled Conversations with Anthropological Filmmakers, which furthered Grimshaw and Hart’s larger project of experimenting with form. These pamphlets featured interviews with prominent anthropological filmmakers, like David MacDougall and Melissa Llewyn-Davies, who spoke about their craft of ethnographic filmmaking. Much like Prickly Pear’s other pamphlets, this series broke conventions — film-based anthropology was thought of as unserious and popularizing. These pamphlets helped prove otherwise.

Prickly Pear was supposed to end there, but much like the success that followed Anthropology and the Crisis of the Intellectuals, the outcry of enthusiasm furthered the press’s momentum. After the initial ten ad-hoc pamphlets, in 1998 Grimshaw and Hart left the press in the hands of anthropologist Matthew Engelke. In 2002, with Marshall Sahlins, PPP author turned publisher at the helm, Prickly Pear became Prickly Paradigm. The reinvented press continued the trailblazing work Grimshaw and Hart began in 1993. Marshall and Matthew, his long time collaborator and, in 2019, owner and publisher of the press, expanded their focus. While still grounded in the discipline of anthropology – about half of the 65 pamphlets published are by anthropologists – they drew on critical thinkers from a broad range of disciplines: political and critical theory, linguistics, sociology, political science, and more. 

Looking back thirty years later, Grimshaw firmly believes that PPP still illuminates exciting arguments through unconventional means. “I think the pamphlet can remain a very important place to still be doing things that are academically recognized, but also doing them in a slightly freer, experimental way.”