A Short History of Prickly Paradigm Press
It’s International Archive Week, which got us thinking about our history. As Prickly Paradigm Press enters its third generation, we want to take a moment to look back. Between new titles, a new website, and Prickly Dispatches, much has changed. But our core mission—revitalizing the pamphlet tradition, breaking down barriers between academic writing and public debate, and publishing sharp perspectives from serious thinkers—has always been the same.
That mission dates back to 1993, when anthropologists Keith Hart (1943-2025) and Anna Grimshaw started Prickly Pear, the germ of the modern Prickly Paradigm. As a small press, they published ten pamphlets that sought, in their words, “to reinvent anthropology as a means of engaging with society.” That era featured groundbreaking work from historian of science Simon Schaffer (From Physics to Anthropology — and Back Again, 1994) and anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (The Relation, 1995), interviews with filmmakers Melissa Llewelyn-Davies and David MacDougall, and more. We’ve made PDFs of these pamphlets from our earliest iteration available free to download on our website.
In 1998, Matthew Engelke took over Prickly Pear from Hart and Grimshaw and partnered with the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1930-2021). With Sahlins as publisher, they transformed Prickly Pear into Prickly Paradigm in 2002, continuing the press’s commitment to cutting edge anthropology while expanding its focus to include critical theory, politics, and more. In this era Prickly Paradigm published some of its best known work, including pamphlets by David Graeber (Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology,2004),Donna Haraway (The Companion Species Manifesto, 2003), Bruno Latour (War of the Worlds, 2002), andSahlins himself (Waiting for Foucault, Still, 2002, The Western Illusion of Human Nature, 2008, Confucius Institutes, 2014, and What the Foucault?, 2018), establishing itself as a small press of big ideas.
In the 2000s, Prickly Paradigm published many pamphlets that responded directly to 9/11 and the War on Terror. Works like 9/12 by Eliot Weinberger (2003), Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror by Bruce Holsinger (2007), and The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual by the Network for Concerned Anthropologists (2009) highlighted how prickly perspectives from the anthropological and wider academic community could shape public and political dialogue.
All the while, Prickly Paradigm broadened its engagement with culture at large, developing a signature off-beat, prickly approach. In the past two decades, we’ve published pamphlets on Marx, Palestine, art criticism, the NBA, big data, Stanley Kubrick, Italian food, colonialism, cannibalism…the list goes on.
Marshall Sahlins passed the baton of executive publisher to Matthew Engelke in 2020, shortly before his death. Engelke further expanded Prickly’s vision, partnering with the Chicago Seminary Bookstore. Together they launched Ode Books, dedicated to book spaces and the book industry. Ode Books publishes reflections on the history and cultural significance of the book, analyses of the industry’s challenges, and ruminations on the intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic pleasures of reading. We’ve published work by Paul Yamazaki of City Lights (Reading the Room, 2024), Booklist editor Donna Seaman (River of Books, 2024), and bookseller turned literature and gender studies professor Katarzyna Bartoszyńska (Reading Together, 2025).
In 2026, Prickly Press passed to a third generation of publishers: historian Peter Sahlins and philosopher Ramona Naddaff, who have served on the editorial board since 2002. Now we’re relaunching the press in a double pivot.
While preserving the press’s legacy grounded in anthropology, we seek a new focus on historically informed perspectives from across the scholarly disciplines. In the latest iteration of Prickly Paradigm, our aim is to expand both the authors and audiences we reach, and to experiment with digital platforms that extend and enhance the printed word. That aim comes to life in our first pamphlet from this new era, The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learningby James Chandler (2026). The print edition publishes this summer, but you can explore the full text and additional commentary online.
The second pivot seeks to realize Keith Hart’s original vision. “We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world,” he wrote in The Memory Bank (2000). That’s our goal with Prickly Dispatches—to redefine what’s possible with a print pamphlet by expanding the work online with outside contributors and perspectives.
We’ve grown and changed a lot in three decades, but our mission is the same as ever: to shape public debate on questions that matter through the power of the pamphlet. We’re excited to share what’s next.
