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

stands as testimony to the crucial role of interaction with others and

If societal discourse (input) is so critical to identity (output), then the

as a means by which to describe and understand the physical, biological

the concept of ego, falling back on the mystical notion of the self as a

of the world becomes broader and more complex, we must create

Some topics in this essay:
Structure Throughout, Generative Grammar, identity social, Noam Chomsky’s, world live, human society, identity social structure, comes contact, “garbage garbage out”, view identity, understanding world, garbage out”, chomsky’s theory, discourse society, social context,