ABSTRACT
This chapter explains about the anthropology of secret police and of collaboration in a society whereby loyalty and betrayal, friendship and duplicity, were so integral to Romanian social life. It describes some aspects of the situation, both generally and in the village. The chapter provides some operating principles of the Old Order in order to show how they reproduce themselves during the transition period. The so-called "transition" in Eastern Europe has usually been discussed in terms of the transition to a market economy and to Western style liberal democracy. The transition in the Romanian countryside is undoubtedly of a quite different sort than simply a trajectory toward democratization and marketization. The associations were both an obvious transitional solution in 1991 and 1992 and for some peasants the only solution. People in transitional Romania are constantly testing their limits and expanding their horizons.
