A top ethnologist looks at life in his village in upper Burgundy as it undergoes one of the most profound transformations of its thousand year history.

Pascal Dibie uses his own village as a laboratory to study the profound transformation of the rural world, which has already become ‘rurban', and to demonstrate that one cannot contemplate things local outside the context of a reflection on things global. Posing the question of the ethnologist's commitment to his own society, he takes us on a voyage through ‘rurbanity'. He examines the daily life of the village by considering how the inhabitants' relate to their consumer goods (do-it-yourself tools, advertising, decoration, shopping, cars, saving things or cleaning out the attic, etc.). He treats the question of belief and considers the ongoing transformation, if not disappearance, of Christian faith, including traditional Christian festivals (Saint Vincent's Day, Saint Hubert's Day), the fading of reverence for the dead, the last gasp invention of new rites (like the 5/5), and the inevitable disappearance of priests. He shows how biotechnology has transformed animal reproduction, how farmers survive thanks to European subsidies and how they are fast becoming mere caretakers of their land. Society is dying, while individual egoism increasingly thrives. The peasant, a qualified technician of now superfluous skills and threatened identity, searches through the mist for a means of integration in a society of devouring globalisation that expands more with each day.