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History shows that the contact between the western world and Polynesia has not always been a harmless experience. Marshall Sahlins explains how Cook in Hawaii fell a victim to a cultural misunderstanding or how the Maoris of New Zealand have been deceived by the Waitangi Treaty. Yet, in these two specific cases as in so many others, the misunderstanding was not necessarily where one would expect it to be: violence does not have to come from the misunderstanding itself. Does the cultural gap generate disorder or, because it is a gap, does it not provide for an inter-cultural space — «a communicational acting space» — that makes the head on collision of two speeches more difficult, and antagonistic as soon as they are similar? As paradoxical as it may seem this question has the merit of changing the form of the problem regarding cultural encounters and raising new sociological analysis prospects. Is what is presented today as an expression of cultural shock: identity claims, culturalism, traditionalism and so forth... the spoken expression of a cultural otherness that has not been understood so far or the result of some fundamental difference?