Reality In The Forest And The Trees By Allan Johnson

Some things in our culture are real, while other things were formed into our reality based on ideas that people invented and somehow embedded in our norms, values, and beliefs. In Allan Johnson’s book The Forest and the Trees: Sociology as Life, Practice, and Promise, Johnson makes a claim to this idea that I completely agree with. Johnson States that “Most of what we take for “reality” consists not of things as they “really” are, but of ideas people have developed about things as they think they are”(Johnson, 39). Johnson explains further in chapter 2, and throughout the book, that some concepts wouldn't be apart of our culture if there wasn't a word for the situation. Johnson goes on to say that “Culture is both material- the “stuff” of
Love is well known in our culture as a feeling of warmth, caring, longing to be with someone, etc. Did love exist before the word love was given these meanings? Love didn’t exist before the word was made up. People may argue that it did, since people “loved” each other before the word was invented, when in fact this is false. Love did exist until the word was invented. Our definition of love may have been present, but without the word to express these feelings, the word love could not exist. Even if the word love was never “invented,” it holds different understandings in different cultures. Love in our sense of a feeling towards someone (romantic, family oriented, etc.) may have a different connotation to another culture, where love could mean something different. If love in one culture can only be used in relationship to our grandparents, for example, then my culture version of love is different than that culture’s version of love since mine can be related to anything and anyone, not just my