Tamar Katriel’s Dialogic Moments indirectly addresses the expectations and realities of an ethnographer’s academic career trajectory. Doctoral research tends to offer the most consistent luxury of time and theoretical enthusiasm, with comparatively few professional distractions. Once on the academic job track, however, the demands of teaching, writing, administration, and career development tend to compete with research, especially for projects that focus on work with people outside the academic world. Katriel’s book offers a fascinating negotiation of this scholarly dilemma. A triptych of sorts, it brings together three in-depth studies from what appear to be three distinct research periods, each with its own subjects, materials, and methods. Although Katriel attempts to unify these studies under the rubric of what she terms the “quest for genuine dialogue” in Israel (1), it is difficult, while reading this book, to imagine these chapters conceived as a whole. Their combined heft within a single publication, moreover, could make this book a laborious read to some, despite the clear syntax. Nonetheless, the ideas Katriel presents continue to add meaningful perspectives to studies of communication and Israeli culture.
Katriel introduces her case studies by touring the work of scholars who have dealt with questions of dialogue. Initially motivated by Martin Buber’s philosophies of mutual recognition through dialogic encounters, Katriel goes on to examine relevant investigations of dialogue in several fields, including folklore, communication studies, and speech ethnology. In doing so, she presents the broad attention scholars have paid to dialogue, and the ways they have directed her thinking on the topic (5). Her discussion evinces broad reading and initiates the reader firmly into the issues associated with academic considerations of the dialogic encounter, though it also foreshadows the loose and sometimes improvisatory manner with which she constructs her subsequent arguments.
Three extended chapters follow, each presenting one case study.
The first follows what Katriel calls the “soul talk” ethos in Israel—an ethos stemming from late-night confessional sharing sessions among utopian Zionist pioneers starting in the 1920s. Katriel traces the history of this ethos by analyzing a series of publications that, she claims, have preserved the soul talk ideology in written form over subsequent decades. The popularity of works such as The Seventh Day in both Israeli and American-Jewish circles illustrates a kind of marginalized-yet-lionized counterdiscourse in discussions of the Israeli national project: what she calls “a road not taken.” Katriel’s analysis in the first two thirds of the chapter offers a beautifully constructed trajectory of the soul talk ethos over time. However, her expansion of the discussion into Israeli theater (an action she defends repeatedly), and especially her attempt to link soul talks with the communal website of young conscientious objectors to Israeli occupation (109–12), strains credulity and threatens to devolve into a claim of any personal counterdiscursive exchange as emerging from the soul talk. Katriel does not ultimately slide too far down this slope, but her overtures in this direction provide a relatively odd, if bold, ending to the chapter.
Katriel’s second case study, her strongest, focuses on dugri, a form of Israeli “straight talk” long regarded among both insiders and outsiders as a storied indicator of Israeli identity. The first half of this chapter, adapted from Katriel’s well-received 1986 book Talking Straight, treats dugri as a ritual process in the manner of Victor Turner. To update her work, Katriel adds discussions of a novel and a political situation from the late 1990s meant to illustrate a recent distancing of Israelis from dugri speech; she also adds a sketchy comparative discussion of musayra, which Katriel describes as a form of Arab speech act that “can be marked by a sense of conversational restraint on one hand, and conversational effusiveness on the other” (219). Once again these added examples offer fascinating insights, but make for somewhat undernourished companions to the detailed-yet-dated ethnographic observation of the first half; the comparative lack of effective ethnographic support in the section on musayra even flirts with stereotype. As a result, her discussion of recent “trends” in Israeli cultural attitudes toward dugri feels selective, constructed by the writer more than the speakers.
The last case study focuses on late-night talk radio in Israel, with specific attention paid to the programs of two contrasting and well-known hosts: Yovav Katz, whom Katriel frames as attracting a largely Ashkenazic (European-derived) Israeli audience, and Yossi Saias, who identifies strongly with a self-described Mizrahi (Middle-Eastern/North African) mindset. Katriel’s discussions of each host’s program, based on interviews and program transcriptions, provides a strong and detailed argument for further explorations of talk radio conversations. As a part of Katriel’s overall discussion of “dialogic moments” and Israeliness, however, it feels out of place: connections with larger discussions of Israeli identity appear tenuous, while other discussions—most notably the influence of religious discourse on talk radio dialogues—seem to go nowhere (309). Katriel attempts, moreover, to situate talk radio discourses as a “politics of counterpolitics” in Israeli society; yet despite well-wrought descriptions of the programs, such conclusions seem best interpreted as an attempt to justify the study’s inclusion in the book.
Katriel concludes by offering an apologia for any perceived unevenness in her book, and attempting to tie her chapters together with a three-pronged model of dialogue-effected “group solidarity.” These dialogic moments, Katriel suggests, illustrate discourses of inclusion and exclusion within the Israeli national project. By situating dialogues within their national and political contexts, moreover, they can be seen as repeated attempts to create idealized communities—impossible in a realistic sense, but worth striving for in the name of larger ideals.
As a scholar, Katriel has long been an astute observer of Israeli culture, and here as well she brings in worthy ideas, interesting questions, lucid writing, and a breadth of research interests and methods. That this book has trouble holding together as a single piece should not, therefore, take away from Katriel’s achievement. Rather, Katriel deserves credit for her attempts to stretch conventions and argue for new areas of consideration in communication studies, while modeling one means of addressing the demands of an academic ethnographic career. This book bends itself out of shape sometimes, but it still offers a wonderful opportunity to generate further dialogic moments.
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[Review length: 1022 words • Review posted on August 22, 2006]