Dorothy Lee Individual Autonomy And Social Structure Summary

In Dorothy Lee’s Individual Autonomy and Social Structure she writes about American culture and its issues with individual integrity. She discusses diverse cultural groups that live in America during 1956 and how their societies are able to implement both individual autonomy and social structure into their ways of living. One of the aforementioned cultural groups is the Navaho Indians of Arizona and New Mexico. Lee suggests that the key social problem in American culture is they are too focused on social structure rather than the human dignity of the individual. From Lee’s research, she suggests that when people from American culture use the ideas from other cultural groups societies, they can better their own society while achieving both individual autonomy and social structure.
One of the cultural groups that Lee writes about is the Navaho Indians. She gives several examples of the way the Navaho Indians live in their society. According to Dorothy Lee, these cultural groups constantly show respect for the individual and their integrity in their everyday lives (Lee, 1956). In the previous paragraph, the example of the Navaho mother and child is explained. With examples like these ones Dorothy Lee shows individual autonomy and social structure working in unison. “The practices I have presented here are not for us to copy, but rather food for thought, the basis for new insights,” Lee writes (Lee, 1956). Dorothy Lee believes with the examples she has provided that the people of American culture can learn something new considering these cultural groups also live in America (Lee, 1956). Dorothy Lee identifies the resolution to the key social problem in American culture is to try a different way of living by using some of the ideas from the cultural groups stated in her article, such as the Navaho Indians (Lee,