I will examine some specificities of ethnographic enquiring among social groups living in two tiny islands in south Vanuatu. Aniwa and Futuna have in common to be “Polynesian outliers”. With less 400 inhabitants each, a huge majority of their native population is living on other islands, especially on Efate near the capital Port-Vila. Both societies are in exchange relations with social groups from Tanna, the populated and hegemonic neighbouring island, whose population claims to be strictly Melanesian. Despite the creation of a colonial divide between Melanesians and Polynesians, the bases of the respective pre-colonial traditions of all these societies are very similar. Due to their small number, people of these outliers share some astonishing psychological traits: a permanent concern to avoid conflicts or to keep them quiet, a sometimes constrained solidarity, a strong discretion in social relations. These traits that are pronounced with regard to foreign observers. But even more specific are the relations they maintain with their exchange partners in Tanna, characterized by strong cultural influences of the former on the latter, which have historically profoundly transformed the heart of their society. Oral traditions collected over these last twenty-five years, tend to reveal how far Polynesian outliers' people succeeded in taking control over Tannese natural resources, and what cultural technology they could have employed to strengthen their influences.