social construction of reality

The spitting demo we did in class really interested me. I already knew that our environment shaped us but I didn’t really pay attention to how much it shapes our reality. If we had grown up seeing people drink the spit of others out of cups we would have seen nothing wrong in it. I don’t really like this. I don’t like the idea that society can change my views so much, that how I see things isn’t really how I see them, but how everyone else told me to see them. This made me think about my last year Human Geography class; we had a whole unit on different cultures of the world. Their was this one particular picture we saw that I felt was a perfect example of social construction of reality; it was this man in this one tribe who's bottom lip protruded several inches in front of the rest of his face because he had had a lip plate there for years to make it that way.  Everyone in my class instinctively said "eww" or "ouch" under their breathes because this was something so strange for us. It looked kind of gross to us, but in their culture that was a symbol of a great warrior and he was considered the epitome of an attractive man. If we had all lived in that society we would have seen that lip plate idea as normal an acceptable and found it weird that in America regular people and important people all look the same. Our social construction of reality would be different. I’ve realized from the first two sociology units that environment is everything.