In their article Gísli Pálsson and Agnar Helgason discuss cross-cultural parallels in moral debate about the expansion of market relations to new areas of social life, with particular reference to their ethnographic work on the commoditization of resource rights in Iceland. Expanding a theoretical approach introduced by other scholars, they propose that spatial metaphors can provide an effective means of conceptualizing the anthropological study of commoditization.

Contested commodities: the moral landscape of modernist regimes