“I Urge Young People not to Rush to Leave for the Great Europe” : On Entrepreneurship in Organic Production in Serbia from an Anthropological Perspective

Abstract

Our research is based on the assumption that in the period after 2008, designated as the “mature stage” of the second transition, decision-makers and experts in the phenomenon of organic production discursively shaped a common, though fundamentally ambivalent system of cognitive ideas and notions relating to this issue and its various aspects, which is designated in this paper as the concept of entrepreneurship in organic production in Serbia. For the purposes of our research, this concept is understood as a mythical notion, as it were, in accordance with the definition of the concept of the myth put forward by the French semiotician Roland Barthes, for whom the myth is a form of speech, a certain discursive formation, and everything that is discourse-related can be a myth. Through an analysis of structural and semantic aspects of the concept of entrepreneurship in organic production in Serbia, the paper looks at both the mechanism of articulation of this concept within expert and public discourse and at its implications, the way in which it is linked to the concrete entrepreneurial ventures of two migrants-returnees, whose entrepreneurial stories have a significant explanatory value in terms of the topic of this paper. The paper aims to highlight the contradictions involved in the concept of entrepreneurship in Serbian organic production and draw attention to the possibility of their creative resolution on the plane of individual ways of thinking and acting in this sphere of entrepreneurship, and also to point to the relationship between two categories that from an anthropological point of view are mutually permeable, namely, the categories of “myth” and “reality”.