This study tackles the transformations affecting the post-socialist Romanian agriculture from the perspective of economic anthropology. While refusing to see economic change either uniquely in macro-social terms or in terms of entrepreneurial culture, I propose to explore the way economic action relates to power relations, networks of social relations, as well as local values and representations. My analysis also takes into consideration the structural transformation in the demand for agricultural products.Having adopted a historical perspective, I examine the interactions and contradictions between the big and the small Romanian agriculture all the way from the beginning of the XIXth century, through the communist period and up to the end of the 90s. While doing this, I give a special attention to the way in which the directions taken successively by the economic action changed in relation to the transformation of the place work and consumption occupied in the lives of rural Romanians. My analysis is based on an anthropological fieldwork realised during 1998 in a formerly collectivised plain village of a southern Romanian department. It takes into account a plurality of actors: chiefs of associations founded after 1991 on the ashes of former cooperatives of agricultural production; chiefs of mechanisation stations; new capitalist entrepreneurs; and new small landowners.Contrary to the official discourse on the reform in the East, which stresses the radical character of the economic change in that region, my study emphasises, besides certain definite novel developments, some important elements of continuity affecting the structures of agricultural production. In that respect, I highlight, in particular, the important role played by the governmental policies of the 1990-1996 period and by the informal networks developed around the economic and political socialist organisations. In the same way, I emphasise the importance, for the comprehension of the post-socialist transformations, of the changes in local systems of values which occurred during the last two decades of the socialist period.