Power: Substance, Relationship, or Discourse?

Power is every bit as complex a social scientific field of understanding as is identity. One of the major sources of variability in social theories of power is whether power is conceived of as a capacity that people have, or an aspect of relationships that results from differences between people in their abilities to make things happen. In the first case, power is seen as a kind of substantial thing. A person or group ‘has’ power, and may even be thought of as stockpiling power for specific uses. In archaeology, approaches growing out of this kind of theory of power may see some people as potentially distinguished by innate charisma, skill, or influence. The personalization of power may be seen as reflected in such things as ‘status badges’, objects that distinguish certain individuals, often recovered in mortuary contexts. It may be indirectly reflected in the accomplishment of community works, such as building of architectural projects, especially if these projects end up as the sites of the residence or burial of one or a few selected people. Here, the energy or labor of the people who built the architecture is seen as the mobilized effect of a power that an individual leader or leading class had. From this perspective, power may also be manifest in such things as control of locations of storage of everyday and special goods, monopolization of imported goods or products of skilled craftwork, or consumption of more, better, more expensive, or rarer goods.

In these respects, approaches that take power as something different people or groups have merge with a slightly different view of power as relational. In these approaches, power is a matter of influence, of differential ability to get things done, and may even be rooted primarily in the way people assess each other. Power in this sense will still be detectable through its products, and will still potentially be reflected in differences in material culture. But it may be seen as more fragile, in need of constant building and rebuilding. From this perspective, rituals, feasts, and even public artworks may be projects undertaken to simultaneously represent power relations, and to reinforce them. The differences between people or groups with more and less power will be seen as less a matter of objective control of more wealth, labor, or resources, and more a matter of representation.

For many contemporary social scientists influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, both of these classic approaches are mistaken, and power needs to be reconceived as a kind of continuous product of social relations. For archaeologists drawing on this latter theoretical literature, power may be seen primarily as ‘discursive’, as lodged in many small, cumulative practices through which each person continuously situates him - or herself in relation to others. These archaeologists creatively employ concepts never intended to be applied to societies outside Europe, identifying ‘surveillance’ as an effect of monumental architecture, for example, or proposing that sculpture in a uniform style was a medium of ‘governmentality’.

It should be clear that these different ways of thinking about power actually merge somewhat into each other. All have material consequences. Power is to be seen in differences between people or groups. It is indexed by different amounts and qualities of goods available for consumption, or by the deliberate and stylized use of unusual, imported, or costly things to set off otherwise similar activities such as meals from those of less powerful people. Power may be performed explicitly in public scenes, festivals, feasts, and rituals, set in special arenas whose construction themselves required power to compel, coax, or persuade labor. Power will be projected, debated, contested, and is subject to being lost, denied, or diminished. These shifts in relative power will be archaeologically visible in changes over time in material culture on the level of small residential groups and larger communities, and even in the individual nutritional and health experiences recorded in the bones of individual people. Because identification divides up the human communities that produced archaeological sites into factions, strata, classes, or other groups, it is intimately tied to the exercise, representation, and contestation of power.