twins, the papers they present, and the texts they produce has an opportunistic style, rather than a methodologically rigorous style. Rather than see the science of twins researchers and twin research as truly impartial and objective, my goal is to expose and make visible, or more explicit, tacitly held (cf. Hastrup 1995; Quinn 2001b), culture-bound, or biased assumptions that are invisible to the largely hegemonic body of Western twins researchers. Thus I subject twins, as well as those who research them, to a critical cultural analysis.
My challenge to the hegemony of biomedically oriented twins researchers should not imply that I disagree with or dismiss the contributions made through positivist biomedical studies of twins. After all, the Twins Days twins freely presented themselves as research subjects out of a strong sense of service. Yet clearly the agendas and purposes of twin research are set and shaped by the researchers and not by twins. Twins as objects of study seldom have any input into the research process. My point regarding twin studies is that there is room for multiple approaches and points of view. Identical twins are “good to think with,” and insider and outsider twinscapes provide the gist for multiple avenues of culturally informed analysis.
••
After I had spent almost a year doing my first fieldwork research in a Newfoundland fishing village in the 1970s, an eight-year-old girl asked if she could walk with me from one end of the village to the other. As we walked, she told me about each household we passed. She commented on who lived there, what they did for a living, and how they were related to other villagers. This was no small task given the fact that most of the nine hundred villagers shared the same three surnames and that marriage among first cousins was common. Widowhood and remarriage blended families in even more confusing ways. Compared to my young companion, I despaired of my own lack of local knowledge, despite my anthropological training in kinship analysis. When I started fieldwork in Norway, my frustration was even more basic, as it appeared that the family dog understood Norwegian better than I did. Moreover, in my classes at the University of South Dakota, I have to repeatedly engage Lakota, who, often having been the subjects of anthropological study, are wary of anthropology and anthropologists. Although I welcome the challenges these situations offer, when it comes to the Twins Talk Study, I must confess to an unabashed sense of satisfaction that comes from finally being the “native.” I feel it incredibly liberating to be a twin and, like my young Newfoundland companion, to have that special insider’s knowledge from having been “born there.”
Yet Twins Talk includes much more than the view from a “pea in the pod.” Twins Talk provides narrative data that produce and enact culture, as do festivals and twin research conferences. The difference is that as this ethnography brings twins to authorship, it shows how Twinsburg twins, as opposed to those who research twins, seem far more aware of how the “Who am I?” questions intersect with Western culture. Researchers show an overwhelming tendency to take their own or Western culture for granted. Even non-Western researchers and researchers who work in non-Western settings view twins through the lens of hegemonic Western cultural traditions. It also seems that if twins are viewed as more than just a method of research, researchers tend to focus overwhelmingly on twins gone bad. At festivals and in life, twins confront and challenge hegemonic notions of self. They do so by normalizing their twinship and by asserting alternative selfways.
Just as the different field sites—the pavilion, festivals, research conferences, and my own body and twin relationship—offer divergent but overlapping perspectives on identical twins, each of the chapters that follow engages a particular twinscape.7Each chapter expresses insider and outsider viewpoints and perspectives. With the exception of performance, the chapters to follow reflect the different disciplinary perspectives that dominate the twin research community. These include biology and genetics, psychology, and the social sciences. Each chapter employs a cultural psychology approach that integrates the chapters and serves to compare and contrast the interest and perspectives of researchers to those voiced by the talking partners. If the purpose of this study is to add to our understanding of how twinship is a standpoint from which life is invested with meaning, the view from the ground up (rather than from the top down) offers a critical reenvisioning of what it means to live in our society.
3: Performance
Culture exists in performance.
—Hastrup 1995a
The stage is set for you!
—ITA Brochure for Nashville Tennessee, 2005
I begin this chapter with an introductory scenario.
It had been well over a year since I had last seen my identical twin sister, Dorothy. While on a weeklong visit to celebrate our fifty-fifth birthday, Dorothy took me to her yoga class. As she introduced me to her instructor, the instructor began to catalogue our physical resemblances and differences—just as if we were little kids. Even after years of living separate lives in different parts of the country and after spending very little time together as adults, we enacted what, in retrospect, appears to be a long embodied routine. We moved close to each other and positioned ourselves, at arm’s length, in front of the instructor. I put my right shoulder on Dorothy’s left shoulder; we tilted towards each other, leaned our heads together and smiled idiotically at the instructor awaiting her assessment. Although neither one of us realized it at the time, we were performing our twinship. Realizing an assessment was at hand, our bodies automatically moved together and our faces smiled widely for our audience of one. Reflecting on the event (and many similar on-the-spot performances to a widening array of Dorothy’s friends and colleagues), what I found remarkable was that we just did this without thinking. Our bodies seemed to act independently of any thoughts that this was a stupid way for two middle-aged, professional women to act. We must have done this so many times in our childhood that the act had become automatic. Because Dorothy has a dimple and I do not, our bodies came together to challenge the observer to identify the difference. We simultaneously satirized and performed our twinship by playing the twin game of “can you sort through the same and guess the difference?”
This scenario or depiction of playing or performing the twin game, or acting the part, demonstrates a kind of interpersonal, in-your-face self-styling that is crucial to the practical experience of being identical twins. For us, this moment of identities in practice, expressive styles (Ceronni-Long 2003), or acting the part took place months before we attended our first twins festival. Our impromptu creation of a twinscape, or our enactment of twinship, involved no forethought or conscious planning. Dorothy and I just did it. It happened with grins and laughter but without words. As jest and gesture among mature adult women, it was as idiosyncratic as idiotic. But it typifies a kind of self-work that twins do. In this particular instance, as we subjected ourselves to the gaze of a critical observer, we confounded her prefigured views of nature that assumed every person is unique or distinct. We invited assessment and comparison. Dorothy’s yoga instructor knows Dorothy, but she does not know me. As we took center stage, the observer looked for similarities and differences, thus confirming both our mutuality and individuality. Our distinctions became contingent to be assessed. We set the stage, as we performed our twinship for the gaze of the other; we also challenged her to do our self-work for us. As the conversation shifted back and forth between the observer and the observed, Dorothy and I took control of the education process. Our constant and exaggerated smiles and coordinated head movements alerted the observer to Dorothy’s dimple. We listened to the observer’s litany of differences until she hit on the dimple as the one that was meaningful to us. Acting the part, our embodied performance of same and different also expressed our connection and mutuality.
We have played this game before. It is part and parcel of the practical experience of twinship. It sets us as twins, the observed, in contrast to the singletons, the observers. As a playful act, the twin game also has a satirical edge that simultaneously mocks and confirms our own society’s cultural persona (Holland and Leander 2004) or stereotype of twinship as a deviant, or transgressive, kind of identity. This is true for the observer as well for us. She could easily have said, “One of you
