final thoughts on power

I defined power in the paper I
wrote earlier in the class as the following: Personal or internal strength,
right one possesses or is given, and authority one has over others. I found it
really interesting how I defined power on fundamentally very personal levels. All
of my definitions are involved with virtually one person and the power he or she might have.

Now when I look at this subject
again, I feel like my original definitions were rather shallow. The meaning of
power can in fact be extended far beyond those if viewed at a broader level. If
I had the chance to re-define “power,” I would say social, economic, and
political power. Actually, these definitions link right back to my original
definitions as well. After all, each individual is a part of the greater
society, thus his or her personal power can be interpreted as an element of the
whole.

Furthermore, I now think that power
does not have to belong to any specific person. In fact most of the time power
is shared within an organization or group. For example, the temple in Uruk, as
an institution, possessed power in all aspects. They were able to collect food,
labor, and service from people by employing the power. By doing so, they
operated the economy of the society, regulated its social order, and had
absolute political control.

I also now feel that power is a
more concrete idea than I thought before. Power does not come out of thin air;
it can be obtained as well as lost. Linking back to the example of Uruk, even
though the temple exercised its power on people by requiring so much from them,
the temple itself was required to provide protection and stabilization for the
citizens as well. In a sense, it can be said that the average citizens
possessed some power to keep the temple in control as well. It’s not to say
that one-sided power does not exist. But thus power is very volatile and
unstable.

But there is one point in my
diagnostic that I’d like to keep: power is spatially and geographically uneven
and differentiable. Power can be defined in many different ways under various
political and social circumstances in different parts of the world. Therefore,
there will never exist a standard measurement of how much power one really
possesses; different conclusions can always be drawn when looking at different
cases.

Sorry I totally forgot
to submit this on time!