Twins Talk. Dona Lee Davis
difficulty, voiced most often by men, was that we offered no monetary compensation or gift packages, as did most of the other researchers in the pavilion. Other twins refused because they felt our study offered no solutions to medical problems or served no higher purpose. One set of twins demurred from participating because it looked like the twins being interviewed were having too much fun for a serious research project. After day one, Kristi felt she was becoming quite desensitized to rejection. We also had a problem in scheduling twins for talk sessions later in the day or on the next day because they would fail to show up. This problem was offset by the fact that recruitment was easy and missed slots could easily be filled by twins present in the pavilion. Not only did Kristi deal with rejection; she had to reject others as well. Scheduling an hour for each interview meant we were fully booked. Kristi also found herself having to tell eager parents of twins that their twins were too young for the project, which limited participants to age eighteen and over.
Conversational Interviews
In the Twins Talk booth each conversation lasted from thirty to ninety minutes. Interviews were recorded on tape and later transcribed. In two intense and exhausting days, we interviewed forty-four people and collected as much narrative data (over four hundred pages) as an anthropologist usually gathers in several months of fieldwork. Briggs (1986, 26) distinguishes between formal, structured surveys and more free-flowing and conversational interviews. Our twin interviews were the latter—a kind of interview where control is granted to the interviewee. It is the interviewees’ task to communicate what they know to the interviewer, and the explanations of the interviewee shape the interview. Dorothy and I were interested in and open to all responses the informants saw as relevant. Yet, although flexible and open-ended, interviews are not naturally occurring genres of talk (Briggs 1986). Conversational interviews still occur in a specific and structured social context. In our case, the specific context was the Twins Talk Study booth at Twins Days. Conversations or interviews may also be hierarchical or egalitarian. Egalitarian certainly described the interaction styles that developed as we talked to twins.
The talking sessions hardly fit the idea of a question-and-response interview. What is missing from the transcripts is the body talk, which frequently punctuated interchanges. This included twins forcefully touching each other as a prompt not only to say his or her name first but to take her or his turn or to correct or censure each other. These nonverbal exchanges, as we see in chapter 4, would emerge as an important part of the analysis. Language was sometimes colorful. For example, Karen referred to the time when “Mother nailed my ass to the wall.” Often it took both twins to make a single statement. This kind of positioned collaboration is illustrated by Donna and Dianne.
Dianne: In twins,
Donna: you know,
Dianne: there’s a leader
Donna: and a leaner.
Dianne: I was the leader.
Donna: I was the leaner.
Dianne: Lean on me.
Donna: I always did.
Following the lead of the Norwegian anthropologist Marianne Gullestad (1996a), Dorothy and I viewed our informational exchanges as conversations, and the twins we talked to not so much as informants or research subjects but as talking partners. For Dorothy and me, unlike our fellow pavilion researchers, our relative and hierarchical position of being researchers, as opposed to subjects, became secondary to our more egalitarian positioning of twins talking to twins. If there is one thing twins know how to do, it is to interchangeably lead and lean while sharing the stage.
When we sat for our first conversation with Chris and Carla, it was the first time in our lives that Dorothy and I had talked, as twins, to another set of twins. We had a lot to say and so did Chris and Carla. Yet, the Twins Talk sessions were not totally open ended. Although aspiring to a natural conversation, Dorothy and I had a set of guiding questions that we would raise throughout the conversation. Moreover, for the sake of the transcriber, partners were asked to say their names each time they made a comment or entered the conversation. Often this was an occasion of high humor with one twin reminding the talking twin to say her or his name.
The conversations were guided by a set of six key questions printed on flash cards. Revealing one question at a time, we worked our way through the interviews assuring an open-ended context but also steering at least some of the conversation around a preset series of topics, which I, as an anthropologist and a twin, felt would be relevant to anthropology. Topics included notions of embodiment, sociocultural constructions of self and identity, and notions of same and different (Rapport and Overing 2000). In many cases we did not even have to ask our questions. Conversations naturally flowed from one question to another. Sometimes Dorothy or I would interject the next topic when conversation lulled. During our talks, sets of twins frequently informed us that they “were just talking about the same thing last night with another set of twins.” Dina, who had recently received her PhD, commented that it was both a conversation and an interview:
Dina: What I really like about this was how the conversation flowed. It doesn’t really feel like an interview. There were questions, I know, but like, one question just blended into the next. And ya’ll were really good at keeping us in the subject matter; basically [you are] good interviewers.
When we went to the International Twins Conferences in Atlanta and Asheville, Dorothy and I were delighted to discover that our questions reflected the ways twins meeting twins converse with each other in more unstructured introductions or presentations of self and selves in casual social situations. Questions covered in the conversations were:
1. As twins, how do you see yourselves today as the same or similar?
2. As twins, how do you see yourselves today as different?
3. To what do you attribute these similarities and differences?
4. Have these similarities and differences changed over your lives? How? Why?
5. What, in your own words, does it mean to be a twin? Have these meanings changed or remained constant over your lives?
6. Tell us some of your favorite twin stories.
7. Is there anything missing that we should cover or is there another topic that, as twins, you would like to bring up for discussion?
Responses to our queries certainly illustrate what Luttrell (1997, 8) describes as a “narrative urgency” on the part of informants to define and defend their selves and their identities. The Twinsburg twins were well primed for conversation. That is what festival twins do. They talk, as sets of twins, to other set of twins about being twins. The twins who talked with us were quite positive about the project and certainly engaged in the Twins Talk Study. As an anthropologist who has conducted research in Newfoundland, North Norwegian fishing communities, and South Dakota’s Indian reservations, I have never experienced easier interview situations. Newfoundlanders, in particular, I found to be outgoing, witty, and articulate. They can tell great stories, but I feel strongly that the Twinsburg study was enriched by my being “one of them”: an identical twin.
During the interview, Tom, one of our talking partners, kept asking us, “How are we doing?” Tom declared that he had only “been rehearsing for this [interview] for forty-nine years.” We did not need to establish rapport. It was instantaneous. Our conversation with Tim and Tom started with high fives all around. Conversations were extremely informal. Judy and Janet began their talking session with Judy’s announcement that the length of the interview would be determined by the size of her bladder. The conversations were fun and regarded as a positive experience by both researchers and subjects. Our transcriber, Angie, commented that there was often so much laughter that she could not hear what we were saying. She wrote “Ha Ha” to indicate laughter. The manuscripts are peppered with “Ha Has.” I have left these out because there was so much laughing and giggling that transcriptions would have been littered with too many Ha Has.
Despite the casual informality and humor of the conversations, the partners also took the occasion to talk seriously. In what follows, Tom assertively takes on the singleton world:
Tom: From what I said earlier, I just think that when people try to figure