What Mauss's theory of the gift can still teach us about value in an era of financialised social relations.
When the value asymmetries that sustain power can no longer be justified, the result is a legitimation crisis.
What symbiotic relationships in nature reveal about the deep structure of value exchange.
Durkheim's sacred/profane distinction reread as a theory of value boundaries and their maintenance.
When symbolic systems claim more than they can deliver, and the social costs of that overreach.
Why the same structural pattern appears at every scale of social life, and what this means for analysis.
Kitsch is not bad taste but a specific failure mode in which aesthetic value collapses into mere sentiment.
The commons is not a failed market but a distinct value form with its own logic of production and distribution.
How chronic illness interrupts not just bodily function but the temporal structure of a valued life.
How artworks function not merely as representations but as active mediators of value in social life.
Living organisms are not merely physical systems but normative ones — they distinguish between better and worse states.
The philosophical case for treating relations, not substances, as the primary constituents of reality.
Parsons's sick role as a case study in how illness creates and destroys value simultaneously.
Ritual does not merely express values — it creates them, fixes them, and makes them transmissible across generations.
Power is not a thing that some possess and others lack, but a structural asymmetry in value transactions.
The price system is not a neutral mechanism for allocating resources but a powerful device for inscribing value.
How value moves between persons, objects, and institutions through five irreducible mediating structures.
Rereading Bourdieu's field theory through the lens of Living Value Theory reveals what it explains and what it misses.