"Identity and Development is in the tradition of the best Pacific ethnographies insofar as it describes living individuals—their specific desires and aspirations, the dilemmas they confront, the cultural ambiguities they must contend with, the constraints and incentives that guide their activities. Van der Grijp explicitly rejects the ‘love of ease which wanders through [...] postmodern anthropology’ and commits to a comparative perspective that presupposes a dialectic between generalities and particularities, between abstract theory on the one hand, and case studies on the other. The book is a fine example of what this entails."

Paul van der Grijp is a senior lecturer in anthropology at the Université de Provence (Aix-Marseille I) in the south of France, where he teaches history and theories of anthropology, economic and political anthropology, and Oceania studies. He is also a researcher of the Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l’'Océanie, Maison Asie Pacifique, in Marseilles.