Anthropologist Perle Møhl lived in a rural French community for nearly two years, studying the everyday mechanisms of coexistence and the continual negotiation of individual and social identities as expressed in discourse – talking, stories, silence and action. What begins as an examination of the enigma between a ‘culture of silence’ and a rich circulation of knowledge evolves into a reflection on the politics of coexistence and the paradoxical relationship between autonomy and interdependence.