Making unquestionable worlds. Morality building practices in family dinner dialogues

Drawing on extant studies and research on language socialization and dinner talk, this chapter focuses on ordinary family interactions as socializing experiences and – at the same time – as culture-building activities. Adopting a conversation analytic approach, examples of video-recorded family dinner interactions are discussed to illustrate how cultural ideas and moral horizons are – at the same time – presupposed and (re)constructed in the micro-order of everyday family life. Specifically, the analysis shows how parents talk into being the cultural certainty that food is a “good that must be preserved” by treating it as an “ought to be shared” resource or as a valuable good per se. We contend that, by taking part in such ordinary dialogues, children are socialized to these cultural beliefs as if they were taken for granted, obvious and uncontestable facts of life. At the same time, it is through such unplanned dialogues that members enact the silent and almost invisible process through which individuals create – day by day – their cultural world as a quasi-natural one. Keywords: conversation analysis; socio-cultural perspective; language socialization; family dinner interaction; practices of control; mundane morality; food as a common good; food and water as intrinsically valuable goods