Dinner Talk: Cultural Patterns of Sociability and Socialization in Family Discourse. - Review - book review

Adolescence, Spring, 2000

BLUM-KULKA, Shoshana. Dinner Talk: Cultural Patterns of Sociability and Socialization in Family Discourse. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997. 306pp. $69.95 (h), $36.50 (p).

Blum-Kulka demonstrates that dinner-table conversations are like holograms, each one a complete, if fuzzy, picture of the diners' culture and their procedures for socializing their children. She has put together one hundred two such meal-time conversations, to give us a fully configured, sharply focused picture of how children become members of their parents' culture, and how parents' behavior shifts to accommodate new cultural influences. Blum-Kulka studied thirty-four families in the United States and in Israel. Their talk during dinner, recorded, transcribed, and analyzed, sheds light on socialization, cultural membership, narrative, code-switching, metapragmatic skills, topic development, and politeness. Chapters include: cultural patterns of communication; the dynamics of dinner talk; topical actions at dinner; telling, tales, and tellers in family narrative events; politeness in family discourse--the traffic of parental social control acts; metapragmatic discourse; bilingual socialization--the intercult ural style of American Israeli families; and family, talk, and culture.