Identity And Social Structure (Reflective Essay)

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Reflective Essay: Identity and Social Structure

Throughout the semester, we have examined the complex relationship between
a person’s identity and his or her social experience. This relationship is
not easily defined, and I believe that the extent to which its two
components (identity and social structure) are influenced by each other
differs from culture to culture, and furthermore, from individual to
individual. The questions which we are to address in this essay, therefore,
have no clear-cut answers, so the most that this paper can hope to do is to
present the insights that I have gleaned from this class, in light of the
background information I had prior to the class.
Essentially, I believe that society defines the type of experiences a
person has, and that those experiences, in turn, play the most important
part in shaping identity and/or personality. Every individual lives within
a society of some description, and in order to survive, (let alone succeed)
in their society, a person must operate within societal parameters.
As we have learned, society is the result of economic condition, political
situation, and (perhaps most importantly) the discourse generated and
propagated by its people. Each human society has all of these components,
but the nature of the components varies; as I have said, every society has a
unique set of parameters. Goffman has pointed out that humans are highly
adaptive to various social situations. In order for an individual to choose
how (s)he will function in a given situation (in Goffman’s terminology, the
“mask” (s)he will wear), (s)he must draw on the discourse present in their
society. Not only does discourse define the various “masks” available to a
person within their social context, it also allows a person to gauge how
best to react to the “masks” of those with whom (s)he comes into contact.
“Masks,” it would seem,...