Michael Dudley
Anthropology 202
17Jun2018
Relationships/Interactions Cultural Anthropology In a typical day, I engage in a variety of interactions and relationships in the course of my interaction with my family, friends, classmates, and teachers. Power has a critical role to play in these day to day interactions and has a paramount role in forming and maintaining relationships. For the purposes of this discussion, power is defined as the ability of an individual to exert influence on the other party so that the influencing agent gets the desired specific outcomes in given situations, while at the same time resisting the influence of the target subject. This is achieved through …show more content…
I tend to exert power over my younger siblings, classmates, and friends. However, senior family members, teachers, and students tend to exert power over me in the course of our interactions. Due to the lack of sufficient knowledge on which partner holds what amount of power in various decision-making areas, it becomes challenging to understand and predict others actions and the overall nature of our relationships. Power dynamics interplay in a number of contexts and interpersonal interactions ranging from close relationships with families that are relatively informal to more formal and impersonal contexts with teachers and senior family members. Various political negotiations exist in the various relationship forms. For instance, possessing versus not possessing power influences the expression and experience of emotions in my daily interactions. In areas where I tend to exert more power (case in point over younger siblings and schoolmates), I tend to experience more positive feelings of enthusiasm, amusement, and joy. On the other hand, I tend to experience negative emotions when others exert power over me. These negative emotions manifest in …show more content…
In most formal and informal relationships, each party is embedded in a social and physical environment that influence the personal characteristics brought into the current relationship. More specifically, the immediate local environment that an individual is raised in influences both the social and financial resources one can access immediately or in future. I also learned that the present or past social environments also helped shape my orientation towards relationships. Age is another important factor in terms of experience because the partner would be entering the relationship with excellent alternatives to the existing