This book examines how identities emerge, persist and change in various Pacific societies. The 'shifting images' of identity are explored in pre-colonial, colonial as well as post-colonial circumstances. All the essays in this volume address both continuity and discontinuity in the construction of identities in the rapidly changing Pacific region. A region increasingly characterized by state-formation processes and global influences. The introduction provides a theoretical analysis of the changing paradigm in the study of identity over recent decades. This is exemplified with a comparative...