Twins Talk. Dona Lee Davis
“Who am I?” question. Mulla’s dilemma takes on a new meaning in the case of identical twins. What is a lived life like when there is someone who is walking around with your face—the primary identifier of your body self? Clearly, identical twins raise a host of questions about the embodiment of identity, the nature of human relationships, and the dynamic search for self. Twins Talk looks to twins to expand on the “Who am I?” someoneness questions posed by twins on the fault lines of person and selfhood. In the process of so doing, it is necessary to recognize multiple aspects of layers of self. Each layer of self carries different kinds of information and different challenges for twins. Jopling (1997), although not referring to twins, describes the layers as somatic, perceptual, motor, interpersonal, cognitive, moral, and cultural. It would be artificial to see these layers as fixed or in any way distinct from each other. As Ingold (2013, 17) notes, “Life is a process of making rather than an expression or realization of the ready-made.” Although my chapters do artificially emphasize different aspects of self, such as body, performance, bond, and kin, what integrates them all is a sustained interest in self work and self styling as enacted in the practical, firsthand experiences of twinship. Twins Talk will show (cf. Marcus et al. 1997, 15) that while cultural participation is never totalizing or uniform, that while self-concepts are not fully identical to the self they represent, and that although twinship confers a power to shape a twin persona, self and relationship must still be regarded as negotiated and enacted within a particular sociocultural context. Twins Talk, through remaining chapters, shows us that twins have a great deal to tell us about ourselves, as Westerners in particular and as bio-psycho-socio-cultural beings in general.
Twins Talk is a book about identical twins (unless otherwise specified, my use of the word twin refers to identical twins and not to fraternal twins), but it is also, as in the case of Lindholm’s (2003) Mulla, a book about “the relation between self and other and the construction of identity.” Situated on the fault lines of identity, twins raise a number of interesting issues about intersections between nature, body, psyche, culture, and society, as well as action and meaning. Twins Talk is not a comprehensive opus on twins. It is a kind of opportunistic and positioned collage that represents where the data took me. Chapter 2—“Talk”—focuses on methods and introduces the wide variety of disciplinary perspectives, venues for research, kinds of data, and diverse sample of twins that ground this study. It sets the scene for dealing with insider (twin) and outsider (nontwin or singleton and researcher) viewpoints or perspectives and deals with universals, as well as differences. Chapter 3—“Performance”—features twin festivals as rites of reversal, where twins become the norm and singletons the exotic other. In chapter 4—“Body”—we witness the complex identity stories of living in look-alike bodies that twins tell, and I contrast these stories to the lore of geneticists. In chapter 5—“Bond”—the twin-twin relationship as depicted as unhealthy or dysfunctional by psychologists is contrasted to the very positive evaluation and open-ended views of twins themselves. In chapter 6—“Culture”—we move beyond myth and legend to place twins in a more informed and dynamic cultural context. As twins talk they remind researchers that science is not culture-free. Chapter 8—“Kin”—features twinship not as a static phenomenon fixed in childhood but as a form of kinship embedded within other relational and lifecycle challenges. Chapter 9—“Twindividuals”—sums up by revisiting the “Who am I?” questions of twins and twinship and puts forth the idea of twindividuals as a way of addressing dualisms inherent to Western selfways. Each chapter provides a cultural psychology–informed analysis that interweaves the voices of twins with those who write about them in the name of science.
2: Talk
Discourse is duplex; it both enacts and produces culture.
—Quinn 2005b
What do they have to talk about? They are telepathic anyways.
—Maddox (2006), remarking on the sight of Twinsburg twins in conversation
Our best methodology is ourselves.
—Cohen 1992
If twins are “like two peas in a pod,” this is a view from the pod.
—Davis and Davis 2005
Twins Talk approaches twins as constructors of and actors in their own dramas. I argue for a person-centered, rather than a disease- or deficiency-centered, approach to twins and twinship. As an eclectic and multifaceted text, Twins Talk works from the bottom up as well as from the top down. The predominant practices, agendas, and biomedical positivism of twins researchers are compared to and contrasted with the subjective and intersubjective experiences as expressed by twins themselves. The former treats twins from the top down as a research method for testing specific hypotheses that are defined and delimited by twins researchers. The latter treats twins from the ground up and views twins as interesting in and of themselves (Cool 2007, 24). The former medicalizes, while the latter normalizes twins and twinship.
Whether I refer to twins researchers or twins themselves, I aim to follow the cultural psychology approach, introduced in chapter 1, to give legitimacy to multiple voices, to emphasize the situated and contextualized natures of knowledge, and to provide space for multiple and sometimes competing twinscapes. The Twins Talk Study represents what Gullestad (1996a) describes as a way of doing ethnography that occupies the interdisciplinary space between the social sciences and the humanities. As a scientific study, Twins Talk critically engages the scientific literature. As a humanistic study, it also draws freely on more intuitive and impressionistic modes of analysis. Twins Talk is not overly concerned with representative sampling or validity or the discovery of any ultimate or profound truth. Instead, it views knowledge, whether scientific or popular, as positioned and culturally constructed.
Any attempt to compare and contrast what twins say to what has been said about them must be harnessed by some centralizing, or focal, concerns. What integrates or flows through my critique of twins researchers or research, on the one hand, and the lived, experiential worlds of twins, on the other, is a sustained focus on sociocultural constructions of self. This includes self as a bio-psycho-socio-cultural phenomenon. The notions of selfways, self stylings, and self work have already been introduced in chapter 1. The crux of my argument is that in the process of accessing what twins tell us about ourselves, twins researchers leave as unexamined their own culture-bound assumptions of appropriate and healthy selfways. In short, these assumptions privilege a Western ideal of competitive individualism (Lindholm 2001). It is the hegemonic quality of this single selfway that so often places identical twins on the fault lines of identity and selfhood. In response, identical twins, as we shall see, must negotiate or self-work their own self stylings as they set about answering their “Who am I?” questions. Self work, as identities in practice or social action, not only entails how identical twins negotiate individual and collective or connected (as a twin pair) identities in a variety of sociocultural contexts and at different stages of their lives but also compares and contrasts what twins say to what has been said about them. This sustained focus on selfways, self stylings, and self work gives twins talk an engaged, face-to-face, interactive, experiential, and practical quality that is unique in the twin studies literature.
As the title of this volume suggests, this is a study of twins talk. As a study in cultural psychology, it privileges the collection and analysis of narrative data (Neisser and Jopling 1997). The conversational narratives that situate analysis and flow throughout the volume come from twenty-three sets of twins who attended the 2003 Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio. My original intent in this study was, with the help of my twin sister, Dorothy Davis, to interview as many sets of twins as possible in the research facilities set up at this particular festival. Yet being surrounded by thousands of twins for one weekend simply whet our appetites to learn more about twins, twins festivals, and our own twinship. Eventually, I would enter the world of twins researchers by participating in two international twin research conferences (Davis and Davis 2004; Davis 2007). All told, the Twins Talk Study is hardly limited to twins talk. It combines elements of multisited (Miller 2006), quick (Handworker 2002), experience-near (Wikan 1991), and reflexive (Behar 1996) ethnography. In what follows, I briefly describe the settings, methods, and populations for Twins Talk.
Research Venues
Twins Talk is based on anthropological participant observation