Twins
Talk
What Twins Tell Us about Person, Self, and Society
Dona Lee Davis
Ohio University Press Athens, Ohio
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davis, Dona Lee, 1948–
Twins talk : what twins tell us about person, self, and society / Dona Lee Davis.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8214-2111-6 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8214-2112-3 (pb) — ISBN 978-0-8214-4499-3 (pdf)
1. Twins—United States. 2. Twins—Social aspects—United States. 3. Ethnology. I. Title.
GN63.6.D38 2015
306.8750973—dc23
2014029923
Acknowledgments
The idea of studying twins grew out of my experiences in giving a series of lectures on embodiment, self, and society at the University of Tromsø in Norway in the 1990s. During that time there was a considerable controversy among the indigenous Norwegian Sami people and representatives of the Human Genome Diversity Project. The controversies whet my curiosity about the relationships between genes and identity, but in a way that was much closer to home—the home of my own body. A study of twins promised to offer some interesting insights into many intersecting planes of experience and analysis, among which are body/biology, personal/social identity, relatedness/relationality, and culture. The two-day research opportunities offered at the Twinsburg, Ohio, Twins Days Festival made it all seem feasible. After having done fieldwork among fishers in Newfoundland and northern Norway, I found the prospect of conducting a study in an area where I had an insider’s perspective based on my own lifetime of firsthand experiences of being a twin—of finally becoming a local expert—very inviting. Twins Talk as an exercise in quick ethnography was also developed as a way for my identical twin sister, Dorothy, and me to spend some time together. My intent at its most ambitious was to present some conference papers and perhaps an article or two. I had not anticipated how interesting twins would be to think with, and what started as a short-term project evolved into a much more involved endeavor.
As I became a twin researcher myself and became more and more immersed in the popular and scientific twin literature, I was put off by the predominating biological and genetic essentialism of twin research and the inherent pathologization of twinship or the twin relationship, most prominently in psychology but in other disciplines as well. Identical twins are variously depicted as clones, as a self and almost self inside the same physical package, and as a single unit or closed society of two. These characterizations seem to have minimal relevance to my own more than six decades of being a twin. What did resonate with my anthropological curiosity, however, were the contentions that identical twins are an unsettling presence that undermines a sense of uniqueness or challenges characterizations of selfhood in the wider (Western) society. My goal became twofold: First, to explicate just what those assumptions or characterization of selfhood were. And second, to provide a voice for twins in this process. Thus it is the intent of Twins Talk to quite literally address what twins tell us about the experience of being twins in Western society. And in turn, Twins Talk becomes a vehicle for comparing twins’ own narratives of their being in the world to the narratives of those who have made twins topics of research. In the process, there emerges a very rich and rewarding source for informed anthropological analysis as it intersects with multiple other disciplines.
Many people over the years have helped with this Twins Talk Study. I would like to thank the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Tromsø in Norway (now the Arctic University of Norway) and the Twins Days Festival Committee for their research grants that helped fund this study. The University of South Dakota (USD) Tuve Fund provided travel funds for Kristi Cody, the projects research assistant, as well as travel funds that enabled Dona to present papers at a number of professional conferences. Kristi Cody, an anthropology major at USD, was an enthusiastic and energetic research assistant. Sandy Miller and the Twins Days Festival Committee provided invaluable help and encouragement during the initial stages of this study. Angela Harrison successfully took on the challenging job of transcribing many hours of taped four-way conversations. Evie Clerx, Danielle Emond, Elizabeth Johnson, and, all USD undergraduate students, have also worked with me on this project. Thanks also go to Jane Nadel-Klein, Gisli Pálsson, Barbara Prainsack, and Elizabeth Stewart for their encouragement and support of the project. Of course, special thanks go to the forty-four twins who participated in the Twinsburg Twins Talk Study, taking the time to sit down and share their lives and experiences of being twins. I hope they enjoyed these conversations. I certainly did. Their stories helped confirm how interesting and wonderful it is to be a twin. Extra special thanks to my twin sister, Dorothy Davis, who played an essential role in the data gathering and attended three festivals with me. It was the first time in our lives that we had the opportunity to talk as twins to twins. Finally, thanks to Richard Whitten, my life partner, whose love and support I will always treasure.
1: Twinscapes
A Sufi teaching story tells of the holy fool Mulla Nasrudin who ventured to a strange city. Before he left on his journey, his wife put a sign around his neck with his name on it so that he would not forget his identity. When he arrived, he spent the first night at a caravanserai; while he slept, a joker took the sign and put it around his own neck. When the Mulla awoke, he was appalled to find his name tag on the joker’s chest. “It seems,” he cried, “that you are me. But if you are me, then who am I?”
—Lindholm 2001
Each individual is biologically unique.
—Pálsson 2007
What would it be like to have lived one’s whole life without ever having seen your own face?
—Herdt 1999
Like Charles Lindholm, I begin my book with a fool’s tale. Lindholm (2001, 3) places the Sufi story at the very beginning of his book Culture and Identity, in chapter 1, titled “Who Am I? The Search for the Self.” He comments that although the Mulla’s dilemma is “ridiculous,” it nonetheless raises central issues concerning the development of a more culturally sensitive or nuanced understanding of one’s sense of someoneness, or identity. The physical body, perceptions of self in relation to other selves, and self as positioned or situated and acting within a wider cultural milieu are all essential components of one’s sense of self (de Munck 2000; Markus et al. 1997). Yet, if you are an identical twin, Mulla’s “ridiculous”
