Keith Hart (anthropologist) - Prickly Pear Pamphlets

Prickly Pear Pamphlets

In 1993, Keith Hart and Anna Grimshaw started a small press called Prickly Pear. Inspired by the eighteenth-century figure of the pamphleteer, their goal was nothing less than to revitalize a stagnant academy. Together, they published a series of ten pamphlets by a range of authors — young, old, unknown, and famous — on a range of topics in anthropology, the history of science, and ethnographic film. "We emulate the passionate amateurs of history who circulated new and radical ideas to as wide an audience as possible," they said. "And we hope in the process to reinvent anthropology as a means of engaging with society." In 1998, Matthew Engelke and Mark Harris took over the press, expanding its operations in the world market and adding a few titles to its list. In 2001, Prickly Paradigm established itself as a new incarnation of Prickly Pear, edited by Matthew Engelke, with Marshall Sahlins as publisher. In 2004, Justin Shaffner scanned the original Prickly Pear pamphlets into a PDF format and made them freely available for distribution on the Internet on Keith Hart's The Memory Bank.