Contested Commodities: The Moral Landscape of Modernist Regimes

Abstract

This article discusses cross-cultural parallels in moral debates about the expansion of market relations to new areas of social life, with particular reference to our ethnographic work on the commoditization of resource rights in Iceland. Expanding a theoretical approach introduced by other scholars, we propose that spatial metaphors can provide an effective means of conceptualizing the anthropological study of commoditization. By attending to the pathways, spheres and boundaries that guide the exchange of social things and the discursive environment within which transactions are negotiated, anthropologists can begin to uncover the dynamics of the moral landscape of the economy. Such an approach, we argue, salvages the concept of exchange from the rather restrictive dualism of embedded and disembedded economic behaviour. The result is an expansion ofthe economy as an anthropological object of study, and a challenge to neo-classical claims of an all-embracing account of economic life in the West and elsewhere. Until recently, anthropologists generally avoided the study of economic life in Western societies. Drawing on Polanyi's (1944) influential conceptual distinction between 'embedded' and 'disembedded' economies, anthropologists generally concentrated on economic life in 'traditional' non-Western societies. The process of commoditization, an intriguing example of dynamism and transformation in the moral economy, has been widely documented by anthropologists in the context of 'traditional' societies, following Bohannan's (1955) study of the impact of general purpose money among the Tiv and Barth's (1967) account of spheres of exchange in Darfur. In such contexts, the economy was perceived as being so deeply embedded in society and culture that it was all but impossible to untangle economic behaviour from the equally intertwined spheres of religion, kinship and political organization. In contrast, economic life in the West was almost exclusively studied by economists, who emphasized the independent nature of the economy in relation to other areas of social life. As Carrier (in press) points out, such was the force of this image that the notion of the 'market' became, for many, emblematic of societies in the West - an occidentalist construction of a disembedded world, pervaded by a rationality of means and ends assumed to be unfettered by social relations or individual and collective moralities. While for many years Western anthropologists focused on the overall impact of capitalism and the 'penetration' of the market into formerly non-market contexts in 'traditional' societies, a number of anthropologists have recently rediscovered the economic 'Other' in the societies of the former socialist bloc, focusing on their transformation at the end of the Cold War with the decollectivization of land, the

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