Reflections

In the period of four months, one can learn a lot of information and skills, and this course is by all means, no exception. Reflecting back on the things that we learned and our knowledge of power before the readings provided to us during this course, I can personally say that I have a more concrete and standardized way of viewing power and its sources. I had written in my diagnostic paper that “power can be defined primarily as the measure of one’s ability to control something”, and while that was true, there was more to it than that. Power only really exists when there is a social environment involved, like a community, a kingdom, or any group of people. In society, there are many sources of these powers, and they are largely outlined by Michael Mann’s article regarding “Societies as organized power networks”. One of the most important things that Mann has taught us about power is that it can easily be broken down into four main sources, some more influential and “stronger” than the rest: political power, ideological power, military power, and economic power. Those are further broken down into practices and how they work, but essentially, we could compare and point out many of the components of power that was involved through each civilization.

Throughout the course of the semester, we built upon the “power” idea, utilizing and putting a perspective on it for many of the ancient civilizations that we have read and discussed. Throughout this semester, we have looked at Uruk, Mesopotamia, Babylon, Assyria, and many other places and civilizations as well. Reflecting back on this course and what we have learned, it is easy to pinpoint the instances each source of power came into play, from the economic power of barley, to the political and military power of Hammurabi. We also talked about the ideological powers of the priests and the temples and how they were able to influence people beyond the political (and sometimes geological) borders.

Getting back to the reflection of the diagnostic paper, I still agree with a lot of things that I said in the beginning, how everyone has some sort of power, because if you influence someone in any way, shape, or form, that is a form of power, even if it is not forced onto the other person. I am actually surprised how I had listed some types of power in my diagnostic paper, and even though the names for them differ from Mann’s view of power, some of them are right on the money. I had written that there was personal, influential, financial, and positional power, and financial and positional power could be directly translated to economic and political power, respectively (albeit political power is a bit more specific). Influential power seems to describe some types of power, like ideological power, but it really isn’t a source of power as Mann had described. However, even now, I still believe that there is a form of personal power (Mann probably didn’t bring it up since it was talking about power within a general society and not within oneself) because one’s decisions to do something may have been influenced by someone or something else, but I am sure that you have the conscious decision-making skills to make such a choice. And so, I believe that can fall within its own category of personal power.

Finally, in my diagnostic paper, I had talked about change and control as functions of power, and to some extent, that is still true after learning about everything in this course. People want power because they can control and can make influential decisions over some or a large group of people, and no matter who is in control, there is bound to be some form of change, no matter how small. No person is ever going to run or do something that is bound to be exactly the same as someone else’s, and so, change and control are still very important elements to power and why so many people want it. We have learned so much over this course of this semester about power, ancient civilizations, and writing, and I feel like it has improved my overall general skills and knowledge in this field, and I would like to thank the professor for that. It was a great semester.