Twins Talk. Dona Lee Davis

      At both meetings of the ICTS a positivist, biomedical, biostatistical approach prevailed. A preference for increasingly larger databases results in the collaborative combining of samples from different studies or data derived from sophisticated twin registries, which already include thousands of twins (Perola et al. 2007), past and present, and vast amounts of potential data. At the conferences twins are seen primarily as a research method rather than as a subject of research. Faceless, depersonalized twins, dead and alive, are reduced to numbers on a form, to a limited series of independent and dependent variables, which are assessed through standardized quantitative methods for purposes of which they had no knowledge when the data were collected. Highly sophisticated, large-scale studies with genotyping laboratories dominate the plenary sessions. More qualitatively oriented approaches such as mine lie at the bottom of the hierarchical heap.

      The conferences not only provided opportunities to listen to presentations and be introduced to the current trends in twin research but also, through the lunches, dinners, social occasions, and bus rides to and from the events, allowed me to informally meet and talk with a wide range of twins researchers. Thus the conferences themselves, as public events, provided yet another venue for ethnographic fieldwork and quick ethnography. Additionally, aside from researchers, another major group of participants at these conferences are representatives of international mothers (parents) of twins organizations (such as International Council of Multiple Births Organization [ICOMBO] and Twins and Multiple Births Association [TAMBA]). Both organizations provide symposia on a host of practical issues that affect parents of twin children. Although one meets the occasional researcher who is a twin, twins are not an invited presence at the conferences. As a twin at these conferences, I began to feel like an oddity. Feeling a sense of distance from other researchers inspired me to consider putting twins researchers and twin research under the ethnographic lens. By the time the second conference in Ghent came around, I had a well-developed sense of being a participant observer at this public activity.

      Again, to paraphrase Okely (1992, 9), the personal has become theoretical. The ICTS conference organization illustrates what Quinn (2005b, 1) refers to as the “harder sciences’ suspicion of anecdotal evidence and a false and unfortunate dichotomy between scientific and humanistic approaches.” For example, the abstract proposal guidelines included no category for the social sciences. At both meetings of the ICTS, paper proposals from the social sciences and humanities get routed to posters and, if they actually get to be scheduled in “sessions,” are relegated to small rooms and unpopular time periods. Like my analysis of culture in talk with the Twinsburg twins’ narratives, my analysis of those who research twins, the papers they present, and the texts they produce has an opportunistic style, rather than a methodologically rigorous style. Rather than see the science of twins researchers and twin research as truly impartial and objective, my goal is to expose and make visible, or more explicit, tacitly held (cf. Hastrup 1995; Quinn 2001b), culture-bound, or biased assumptions that are invisible to the largely hegemonic body of Western twins researchers. Thus I subject twins, as well as those who research them, to a critical cultural analysis.

      My challenge to the hegemony of biomedically oriented twins researchers should not imply that I disagree with or dismiss the contributions made through positivist biomedical studies of twins. After all, the Twins Days twins freely presented themselves as research subjects out of a strong sense of service. Yet clearly the agendas and purposes of twin research are set and shaped by the researchers and not by twins. Twins as objects of study seldom have any input into the research process. My point regarding twin studies is that there is room for multiple approaches and points of view. Identical twins are “good to think with,” and insider and outsider twinscapes provide the gist for multiple avenues of culturally informed analysis.

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      After I had spent almost a year doing my first fieldwork research in a Newfoundland fishing village in the 1970s, an eight-year-old girl asked if she could walk with me from one end of the village to the other. As we walked, she told me about each household we passed. She commented on who lived there, what they did for a living, and how they were related to other villagers. This was no small task given the fact that most of the nine hundred villagers shared the same three surnames and that marriage among first cousins was common. Widowhood and remarriage blended families in even more confusing ways. Compared to my young companion, I despaired of my own lack of local knowledge, despite my anthropological training in kinship analysis. When I started fieldwork in Norway, my frustration was even more basic, as it appeared that the family dog understood Norwegian better than I did. Moreover, in my classes at the University of South Dakota, I have to repeatedly engage Lakota, who, often having been the subjects of anthropological study, are wary of anthropology and anthropologists. Although I welcome the challenges these situations offer, when it comes to the Twins Talk Study, I must confess to an unabashed sense of satisfaction that comes from finally being the “native.” I feel it incredibly liberating to be a twin and, like my young Newfoundland companion, to have that special insider’s knowledge from having been “born there.”

      Yet Twins Talk includes much more than the view from a “pea in the pod.” Twins Talk provides narrative data that produce and enact culture, as do festivals and twin research conferences. The difference is that as this ethnography brings twins to authorship, it shows how Twinsburg twins, as opposed to those who research twins, seem far more aware of how the “Who am I?” questions intersect with Western culture. Researchers show an overwhelming tendency to take their own or Western culture for granted. Even non-Western researchers and researchers who work in non-Western settings view twins through the lens of hegemonic Western cultural traditions. It also seems that if twins