of what anthropologists call an autoethnographic, autoanthropology or self-reflexive, approach (Behar 1996; Ellis et al. 2011; Strathern 1987;Visweswaran 1994).
Autoethnography, according to Ellis (Ellis et al. 2011, 1), “is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno).” Autoethnography is both a process and a product aiming to critique scientific ideas that include what research is and how it should be done. Grounded in personal experience, autoethnography draws on one’s self and one’s home as ways of bridging artificial divisions among the personal, physical, psychosocial, and phenomenal aspects of living (Rapport and Overing 200, 18). Being multidimensional, autoethnography is also sensitive to identity politics and recognizes that different people make different kinds of assumptions about themselves and the worlds in which they live (Ellis et al. 2011, 1).
For once in my career I am the native. I have firsthand and lifelong personal and interpersonal experience in this field of study. As the “others” in a singleton-dominated world, Dorothy and I have lived our lives in what Hastrup (1995) refers to as the contact zone.6If ethnography can be described as the “thickest form of information” (Ortner 2006, 10), in Twins Talk I bring my own lifelong, autoethnographic perspectives to the thickening process, filling in holes in the data, giving additional examples, and adding subtext to text. Although the fieldwork portions of this study include little more than two weeks’ time, Dorothy and I have over 120 years of living in the field.
As an identical twin, I have had the firsthand physical experiences of living in a twin’s body and intimately sharing childhood spaces and places with my identical sister, Dorothy. Hollan (2001, 8) suggests that one of the key problems for those who study the embodied aspects of experience is ascertaining how we can know that the senses, perceptions, and bodily experiences we attribute to our subjects are not actually the researcher’s own perceptual projections or preoccupations. Certainly I make no pretense of being Pete and Emil, Donna and Dianne, or Janet and Judy (or even Dorothy), but as an identical twin I have a firsthand experience with the embodiment of twinship that gives me my own perspectives on my body, as well as on what I see as a researcher’s own perceptual projections and preoccupations when it comes to me and my own embodied self as a twin. Yet, the Twins Talk Study is not just an exercise in reflexive anthropology or mutual navel gazing. Talking to other sets of twins and attending twins festivals developed my sense of being an anomaly, an “other” in a singleton-dominated world. It also provided me with a kind of stranger status and embodied standpoint with which to view issues of self and identity in the wider cultural milieu that assumes embodied uniqueness and privileges individualism by opposing it to mutuality. Thus, it is important to realize that being twins is but one locus (and a crucially important one) of a set of multiple and fluctuating loci along which we are aligned with or set apart from those whom we study (Narayan 1997).
Although I admit to being an experienced interviewer, at home in my body, and having a longtime, firsthand experience with twinship, none of this mitigated the shock I experienced at my first twins festival and the sight of thousands of look-alike adult twins. Originally thinking of Twins Days only as a way to collect lots of data, I had no inkling of the visual impacts that the festival twinscapes would have on me. My (and Dorothy’s and Kristi’s) embodied, visceral reaction to perambulating multitudes of identical pairs would eventually figure quite prominently in the Twins Talk Study.
Performance
How persons enact culture or act on the world cannot be reduced to language and meaning. Ewing (1990, 253), who contends that the self is grounded in language rather than flesh and blood, has clearly never been to a twins festival. As I have already noted, conversations transcribed into texts or words on paper hardly do justice to the Twinsburg twins’ conversations. Talking about twinship as embodied is not the same thing as embodying it. Any analysis of twins in a festival setting must go beyond narrative, or talk, to engage embodied selves in practice and action, in terms not only of how meanings of self are achieved but also of how self or selves are put to use (Bruner 1990). Our interview conversations offered an opportunity to view culture as enacted or produced in moments of interaction that were nonverbal. Twinsburg twins, or our talking partners, sit side by side. They are dressed exactly alike. They link their bodies through held hands and mutual touching, be it stroking, caressing, or poking and hitting the other twin. They have come to Twinsburg to celebrate their twinship. Conversations offered a chance for twins to perform their twinship and put their selves to work. Yet the conversations take place within the purview of the wider festival and are impartible from it. Festival twinscapes are designed to shock and unsettle and festival twins take rebellious joy by collectively performing their twinship in ways that both confirm and challenge their stereotypes. A festival performance approach allows for insights into what “minds and body are doing as they are doing it” (Rosch 1997, 187).
At the beginning of Twins Days, Dorothy and I were standing outside the Research Pavilion with a fellow researcher. We were watching masses of identically dressed twins entering the festival grounds. Our companion, an old hand who had already logged several years at the pavilion, remarked to us on the sight of so many twins, “You never get used to it.” Initially, I thought of Twins Days solely as a way of accessing a good sample and collecting a lot of narrative data during a short period of time; I had certainly not anticipated the emotive impact of seeing over a thousand twin pairs. The sight of so many identically dressed twin pairs packs a responsive wallop that is felt in the body. At Twinsburg we witnessed twins being twins by the thousands. I had not anticipated the extent to which the festival would invite its own kind of analysis. The performance of twinship at twins festivals is a key situating context of the Twins Talk Study. For example, chapter 3 offers and situates many of the key arguments detailed in the remaining chapters. At festivals twins perform their embodied likeness and their mutuality or the bond that unites them.
In this participant observation study, not only do Dorothy and I negotiate multiple pathways among selves and others, we traverse boundaries between work and play. At Twinsburg we watched the festival taking place around us and also participated in the nighttime activities that were held off the festival grounds. These included officially sponsored picnics as well as unofficial parties at local hotels. We booked a room for the weekend in what was advertised online as the “party hotel.” Here festivities included socializing, drinking, and dancing until the early hours of the morning. Other party venues included camping sites where twins also could mix and mingle after festival hours. Feeling the need for a more experiential sense of festivals as participants and not just researchers, Dorothy and I decided to attend other twins festivals at public venues where we could be daytime or nighttime participant observers in a less formal setting. Attendance at two annual ITA meetings allowed us to participate in the full range of festival activities.
The ITA meetings are much smaller (160–200 twins, mostly adults), more structured, and more contained than Twins Days. Each year the association meets in a different place with participants sharing the same hotel. Although most of the participants are regular attendees and already know each other, organizers of the two ITAs we attended made sure that new twins were made welcome. The overall ambience was intimate, friendly, and fun. Although they complain about rising costs, most ITA twins participate in the total round of activities that are planned for all. These include dinners, contests, evening parties, and tours of local sights. Middle-aged and older women predominate at the ITAs, and men are few and far between. At the ITAs we discovered how much fun it was to meet other twins, spend time with them, and participate in the planned events. The first ITA meeting Dorothy and I attended was held at the end of summer in Atlanta, Georgia. We enjoyed the experience so much that we decided to return and take part in the association’s festivities held in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2007. My analysis of cultural performance and expressive styles (chapter 3) is largely based on observational data collected during public events at the three festivals.
Twin Research and Twins Researchers
When I began to conceptualize and plan this study, as in any scholarly endeavor, I set out to
