Young Tahitians affirm their identity through activities legitimized by an ancestral culture regarded as sacred which is largely reinvented, institutionalized and diffused by modern transmission channels. At the same time they react to this ideological reconstruction from their own values, which gives rise to the formation of sub-cultures that are sometimes perceived as counter-cultures. The diffusion of Californian and Hawaiian models in Tahiti since about fifteen years has led young Tahitians to claim more and more their “cultural difference” embodied by their ma’ohi specificity and to express it through modernized traditional practices such as tattooing, surfing or Polynesian pirogueing.