CONTESTED COMMODITIES - THE MORAL LANDSCAPE OF MODERNIST REGIMES

This article discusses cross-cultural parallels in moral debates about the expansion of market relations to new areas of social life, with p articular reference to our ethnographic work on the commoditization of resource rights in Iceland. Expanding a theoretical approach introduc ed by other scholars, we propose that spatial metaphors can provide an effective means of conceptualizing the anthropological study of commo ditization. By attending to the pathways, spheres and boundaries that guide the exchange of social things and the discursive environment wit hin which transactions are negotiated, anthropologists can begin to un cover the dynamics of the moral landscape of the economy. Such an appr oach, we argue, salvages the concept of exchange from the rather restr ictive dualism of embedded and disembedded economic behaviour. The res ult is an expansion of the economy as an anthropological object of stu dy, and a challenge to neo-classical claims of an all-embracing accoun t of economic life in the West and elsewhere.