master’s thesis was on biocultural aspects of variation in twinning frequencies (Dona Davis 1971), I had some familiarity with at least the older literature on twins. One of my initial aims in formulating the Twins Talk Study was to first identify anthropologically informed works and then move on to a comparative analysis of anthropological perspectives as compared or contrasted to the perspectives of other disciplines that were also interested in twins. What I discovered was that twin research itself has developed into an area of interdisciplinary specialization, with its own journals, research conferences, and hierarchy of researchers. The more twin research literature I read, the more sensitive I became to its medicalized view of twins and twinship and lack of interest in twins “from the ground up” or in and of themselves.
I am certainly no stranger to a feminist and culturally informed critique of Western biomedical texts and research methods (Davis 1998, 1995, 1983a). My experience in the critical analysis of texts, however, was a far cry from what it felt like to be a twin in the Twins Days Research Pavilion. The pavilion was a warm and welcoming environment where Dorothy and I worked side by side with other twins researchers. Yet, for the hordes of service-minded twins who came through the pavilion, Dorothy and I were the only researchers interested in what our partners had to say about their lifetime personal and interpersonal experiences of being twins. In the pavilion we observed other research groups who were interested in only twins’ ears, skin, bladders, hair, taste buds, altruism, handwriting, or sleep patterns, all as they related to their genes. We could hear twins gag as buccal smears were collected from the back of their throats. As the days went on, I became more and more sensitive to being reduced to my genes or even molecules, to being of interest only as an object of research. Like our talking partners, Dorothy and I found ourselves becoming hyped on being twins. At Twinsburg Dorothy and I found ourselves becoming “militant twins,” beginning to feel that we needed, “as the native,” to strive for a voice in the research process. I complained in a media interview, “We are more than just walking organ banks” (Barrell 2003). It began to seem that the Twinsburg volunteer twins might as well have been zombies or performing monkeys, given the amount of interest researchers displayed toward them as persons or toward their own perspectives on their practical and interpersonal experiences of being twins.
As the biologist Ruth Hubbard (1979, 47) states, “There is no such thing as objective, value-free science.” When it comes to issues of women’s physical and mental health, I am well aware that what passes for science or truth actually reflects Western cultural, as well as androcentric, ways of thinking (see note 1). A benefit of the cultural psychology perspective is that it recognizes that within and among societies there exist alternative or multiple constructions of self. Hardly benign, these constructions reflect power relations (Lutz 1990; Markus et al. 1997). My first twin research conference was reminiscent of my participation, with other anthropologists, in international menopause research conferences and my work as a consultant on internationalizing diagnostic criteria for mental illnesses. The difference was that this time I, as a twin, was the topic of research, and I was the only anthropologist in attendance. Actually, my original purpose in giving a paper at my first twin research conference, the International Congress of Twin Studies (ICTS), in Odense, Denmark, in 2004, was to be able to attend a Danish twins festival that was to be held at the same time as the conference. The festival, I learned only on arrival at the conference, had been canceled due to lack of funds and interest. My primary purpose for being there thwarted, I had failed to anticipate the extent to which my participation (by presenting a paper) in the Odense conference (and later at the ICTS to be held in Ghent, Belgium, in 2007) wouldprovide a body of data on twin research and those who research twins to be woven throughout this book.
Doing interviews: twins talk at Twinsburg
Babies at Twinsburg (photo by author)
Young girls at Twinsburg (photo by author)
Young women at Twinsburg (photo by author)
Midlife at Twinsburg (photo by author)
Elders at Twinsburg (photo by author)
Look-alike contest, ITA, Asheville, North Carolina (photo by author)
Look-alike kings and babies at Twinsburg (photo by author)
Two Amelia Peabody’s with mummy: anthropologists at Celebrity Night at the ITA in Asheville, North Carolina
At both meetings of the ICTS a positivist, biomedical, biostatistical approach prevailed. A preference for increasingly larger databases results in the collaborative combining of samples from different studies or data derived from sophisticated twin registries, which already include thousands of twins (Perola et al. 2007), past and present, and vast amounts of potential data. At the conferences twins are seen primarily as a research method rather than as a subject of research. Faceless, depersonalized twins, dead and alive, are reduced to numbers on a form, to a limited series of independent and dependent variables, which are assessed through standardized quantitative methods for purposes of which they had no knowledge when the data were collected. Highly sophisticated, large-scale studies with genotyping laboratories dominate the plenary sessions. More qualitatively oriented approaches such as mine lie at the bottom of the hierarchical heap.
The conferences not only provided opportunities to listen to presentations and be introduced to the current trends in twin research but also, through the lunches, dinners, social occasions, and bus rides to and from the events, allowed me to informally meet and talk with a wide range of twins researchers. Thus the conferences themselves, as public events, provided yet another venue for ethnographic fieldwork and quick ethnography. Additionally, aside from researchers, another major group of participants at these conferences are representatives of international mothers (parents) of twins organizations (such as International Council of Multiple Births Organization [ICOMBO] and Twins and Multiple Births Association [TAMBA]). Both organizations provide symposia on a host of practical issues that affect parents of twin children. Although one meets the occasional researcher who is a twin, twins are not an invited presence at the conferences. As a twin at these conferences, I began to feel like an oddity. Feeling a sense of distance from other researchers inspired me to consider putting twins researchers and twin research under the ethnographic lens. By the time the second conference in Ghent came around, I had a well-developed sense of being a participant observer at this public activity.
Again, to paraphrase Okely (1992, 9), the personal has become theoretical. The ICTS conference organization illustrates what Quinn (2005b, 1) refers to as the “harder sciences’ suspicion of anecdotal evidence and a false and unfortunate dichotomy between scientific and humanistic approaches.” For example, the abstract proposal guidelines included no category for the social sciences. At both meetings of the ICTS, paper proposals from the social sciences and humanities get routed to posters and, if they actually get to be scheduled in “sessions,” are relegated to small rooms and unpopular time periods. Like my analysis of culture in talk with the Twinsburg
