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 fieldwork (LeCompte and Schensul 1999; Schensul, Schensul, and LeCompte 1999) at two different types of twin-centered activities or venues. The first type of venue is twins festivals. Dorothy and I attended and participated in three weekend festivals. One was the Twins Days Festival held in Twinsburg, Ohio, in the summer of 2003. Twinsburg is the queen of twins festivals, attracting over four thousand twins per year. At Twinsburg, Dorothy and I sat in a booth at the Twins Days Research Pavilion, surrounded by other researchers who study twins, and interviewed twenty-two sets of twins in two days. Yet participant observation often involves the unanticipated. Restricted to the research areas, Dorothy and I wanted to experience other festival activities. This inspired us to follow up on our Twinsburg experience by attending two additional twins festivals as full-fledged participants. We chose to attend two annual meetings of the International Twins Association (ITA). Dorothy and I participated in ITAs held in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2003 and in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2007. The ITAs are held every Labor Day weekend at different locations. Compared to Twins Days, the ITAs are much smaller (160 twins), more structured, and more intimate. These three sites of participant observation and research are further described in this chapter.
Besides generating an interest in festivals, the experience of sitting with Dorothy and talking with other sets of twins in the Twins Days Research Pavilion placed us side by side with other twins researchers. Although Dorothy and I were in Twinsburg as researchers collecting narrative data from as large a sample of twins as we could muster during two days, as twins, we could have easily offered ourselves up as data for other researchers (although we did not). The experience of being a twin researcher among twins researchers, as well as the subject of research among other subjects of research, began to tweak my interests in the field of twin research itself. I was able to follow up on this interest when I presented papers (Davis 2007; Davis and Davis 2004) at two international academic twin research conferences. These were the 11th and 12th International Congresses on Twin Studies held in 2004 in Odense, Denmark, and in 2007, in Ghent, Belgium, where I not only attended sessions and presentations but also got to meet and interact with a wide variety of twins researchers. These two conferences allowed for a firsthand, up-to-date, and comprehensive crash course in twin research, and by attending I learned a good deal about the twin research community. I did not anticipate the importance these conferences would have as field sites for the study of culture and for my own developing identity as a militant twin until I started to write this book after the first conference. What had originally been designed as a quick study of a sampling of twins in Twinsburg would evolve into a much more long-term and multifaceted piece of research.
Although they took place over a period of four years, these research events totaled no more than twenty days. Attendance at these large-scale public events, whether they are festivals or research conferences, hardly seems conducive to developing an intimate familiarity with those in the field or acquiring depth of data that is supposed to result from longer periods of “immersion” in the field (Josephides 2010; Schensul et al. 1999). This leads to a third and very important venue of research—me. Twins Talk is a view from the pod. As an identical twin, I have maintained a consistent autoethnographic and reflexive approach to my analysis. Dorothy and I were also interviewed in Twinsburg by our research assistant, Kristi Cody. Yet we are more than the twenty-third interview. As Cohen (1992, 225) writes, “Our best methodology is ourselves.” In this sense Twins Talk has elements of experience-near (Wikan 1991) and reflexive (Behar 1996) ethnography. I have a lifelong intimacy with, or firsthand experience of, twinship and of being an identical twin. My awareness and interest in intersecting and multiple, insider and outsider twinscapes are informed in part by how they form around and affect me as both subject and object of study. I have a firsthand and lifelong experience with the issues raised in this text. Attending festivals and conferences and working side by side with my twin sister, Dorothy, have challenged me to rethink my own twinship and twinship in general. My previous forays into the field of cultural analysis and medical anthropology have also provided me with a background to study twins in various Western cultures. As a medical and psychological anthropologist who has studied Newfoundland and northern Norwegian fishing communities, I am experienced in turning the ethnographic gaze on others (Davis 1998, 1997, 1983). My challenge here is to turn that gaze on a world that is far more familiar to me.5
Narrative and Experience: Finding Culture in Talk
As a cultural analysis of twins and twinship, this study is eclectic rather than comprehensive. Certainly there are many roads not taken. The book is rooted in narrative analysis and goes where twins talk takes me. Each chapter highlights a particular aspect of a twin’s own experience of being a twin. The famous Minnesota twins researcher David Lykken (McGue and Iacono 2007) was noted for his repeated comment that “the plural of anecdote is not data.” In twin studies, quantitative data certainly trump qualitative data. Yet within anthropology and cultural psychology we have a much greater respect for the utility of narrative data.
People apprehend experience and tell about the world narratively. Narrative has an interactive, intentional dynamic and is about knowledge as being negotiated, situated and conditional, and positioned (Bruner 1987, 1990; Garro 2000; Nelson 1994; Ochs and Capps 2001; Richardson 1990; Truscott, Paulson, and Everall 1999). Narrative can be viewed as a kind of self-location (Rapport and Overing 2000) and can reveal internalized sides of culture or an individual’s understandings of his or her life, motives, and identities (Quinn 2005b). Narrative may take the form of whole stories or dramas involving actors and sequencing of actions, goals, and scenes (Bruner 1990). But narrative may also include everyday, ordinary, interactive, shared and collaborative, conversational activity. Twins talk is a narrative in action and interaction. Our transcriptionist, Angie (whose job it was to record who said what), often cited in text notes that “you are all talking at once,” attesting that narrative can be free-ranging, haphazard, messy, and chaotic (Gullestad 1996b; Ochs and Capps 2001; Shweder 1991). Yet stories get told and, in the telling, selves and identities are located.
However chaotic, the rough-draft quality of narrative can air unresolved life events, where a moral stance or disposition toward what is good or valuable, and how one ought to live in the world, may be declared. Narrative is made in terms of preexisting categories or meanings. In Finding Culture in Talk, Naomi Quinn (2005b, 2) states that “Discourse is duplex; it both enacts and produces culture.” Going beyond generalizations about self and personhood allegedly consistent across all social situations, a discourse-centered approach focuses on specific social events, particular practices, and other types of social arrangements. The psychologist Jerome Bruner (1990) views narrative as a kind of folk psychology that keeps the uncanny at bay and renders the exceptional and idiosyncratic comprehensible. Festival twins as a special population or
