1997). Not only does a cultural psychology perspective allow me to integrate what has turned out to be a collage of chapters on twins festivals, bodies, bonds, and life cycles drawn from different research venues, it gives primacy to personal, lived experience (Casey and Edgerton 2005; Holland 2001). First, it recognizes diversity or variation between different cultures and historical periods, as well as variations within them. Selfways and self stylings are emergent. They are situated and participate within particular and multiple, sometimes contradictory, contexts. Twins are not simply a category or a uniform group. Nor can or should they be reduced to their twinship. There are substantive differences to be found among them—biologically, cross-culturally, and intraculturally. For example, when it comes to independence and interdependence, two key features of the twin experience, comparisons within and between cultures demonstrate that there are multiple ways to construct and express interdependence and independence. Additionally, a cultural psychology approach positions insiders’ views vis-à-vis outsiders’ representations of them. Not only does this book address twins’ and singletons’ views, it also takes into account twins’ views of singletons’ views of twins. Twins Talk shows how twins are acutely aware that twins researchers have a culture too. Second, cultural psychology recognizes the importance of the embodied, physical, and perceptual self. If a self-system is where the individual as a biological entity becomes a meaningful entity, then “identical” twins, whose very biological individuality is challenged, undermine key assumptions of self-systems. With highly resembling faces and bodies that are confused or conflated by observers or even characterized as clones with the same underlying genetic blueprints, twins’ self stylings and self work must start from physical baselines that are hardly familiar to singletons. Third, cultural psychology regards a person as not only situated in time and space but having a variety of interpersonal identities and participating in a variety of interpersonal relationships. Twinship, the twin relationship, or the twin bond is both praised and denigrated for its mutuality and is seen as having profound implications when it comes to nontwin relationships.
A cultural psychology approach also works well as a way of engaging the Twins Talk Study as a multisited study that includes participant observation at three twins festivals and two international twin research conferences, narrative data obtained during conversations with twenty-two sets of twins attending the Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, plus my own lifelong experiences of twinship with my identical twin sister, Dorothy. By collecting data at festivals where twins celebrate their twinship, by gathering narratives from twins themselves, and by positioning myself as an expert, both as a twin and as a researcher, I view twinscapes through the lens of cultural psychology to compare and contrast twins’ perspectives on the twin condition to the perspectives of scientists who research twins. Twins are good to think with, but twins themselves never get to do much of the thinking. In Twins Talk my focus is on lived experience. Selfways and self work imply a need to get beyond thinking to doing and being (Neisser 1997).4A cultural psychology approach gives twins agency as they negotiate their identities, relationships, and lives in ways that simultaneously set them apart from and integrate them into the wider, normative cultural expectations. Twins rebel, adapt, and refine the “Who am I?” questions of twinship that in the twin research literature tend to be hegemonically asked and answered by nontwins. Language plays a critical role, and cultural psychology focuses its efforts on the collection and analysis of narrative. When pairs of twins talk about being twins, they present themselves as multifaceted beings in a wide variety of situations and contexts. They agree and disagree with each other, jump from topic to topic, and punctuate their conversation with caresses, slaps, tears, and laughter. The narrative data in this book invite an analytic framework that engages identities (the “Who am I?” questions) as enacted, imagined, negotiated, and embodied from the ground up (Holland et al. 1998).
Twins Talk is unique in the twin research literature because it seriously, critically, and literally engages the question of what twins tell us about ourselves. In Twins Talk, researchers come into an environment dominated by twins, rather than vice versa. When it comes to the twin research literature, twins are only a database; they neither get to determine and ask the questions nor get to provide their responses on or in their own terms. Rather than see twins as voiceless, passive objects of study, or as the carriers of “hidden” genetic codes, or as victims of “underlying” psychodynamic processes, and rather than reduce twins to a series of population-based statistics, a narrative study approaches twins as constructors of and actors in their own dramas. Narrative data from the Twins Talk Study come from sets of twins, in the company of each other, talking about what they feel is important about their experience of being twins. The data have an interactive, dialogic quality about it that is unique in the twin literature. It is the only study I know of that situates analysis in twins’ own twinscapes, which include both twins’ views of themselves and their reactions to “others’” (whether family’s, singletons’, the popular culture’s, or scientific researchers’) views of them.
Charles Lindholm (2001) states that understanding implies an imaginative identification with the position of the other. My advocacy of a behind-the-face, experience-near, everyday-life, and lifecycle approach, however, goes beyond an imaginative identification with the other. I am, so to speak, the other. I am an identical twin and my identical twin sister, Dorothy Davis, worked (and played) with me to collect the narrative data for this book. Rather than informants, we refer to these twenty-three sets of twins as our talking partners. As a twin, I take a culturally and experientially (Throop 2003) informed stance to examine the meaning and experiences of twinship among this sample of twins. My personal and interpersonal twinscapes are voiced in Twins Talk. Readers will find a strong auto-ethnographic, reflexive component to this study (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011). To paraphrase Okely (1992, 9), the personal has become theoretical. Through this study I have found myself becoming a “militant twin,” one who both champions twins and twinship and resists the more negative or medicalized portrayals of twins and the twin condition in the popular and academic literature.
By comparing twins, the twinscapes of twins, and those who research twins, I further employ a cultural psychology approach to address tensions between self stylings within a cultural system. Culturally dominant forms of selving that are more recognized and explicated by twins than researchers do not occur in a power vacuum; not all identities are equal, and selfways exist within frameworks of social inequality and power relationships based on tradition and history. In the overwhelming majority of twin studies (see Segal [1999] for an excellent review of the literature), twins researchers study from the top down. Twins are approached not as people but as a population of study. Scientific researchers tend to objectify twins and reduce or condense the twin experience to quantitative data or a few variables that conform to highly specific research agendas. Twins, as located on the fault lines, do a great deal to make the cultural assumptions of twins researchers more visible. The often counterhegemonic selfways of twins are of particular interest because they challenge, transcend, and conflate many of the dualisms associated with Western culture. These include mind/body, self/other, nature/culture, normal/deviant, autonomy/mutuality, masculine/feminine, and perhaps most important, same/different. In this volume, I use twins talk to explore the notion that scientific researchers also have a culture (Lock 2005; M’Charek 2005; Pálsson 2007). Past and present hereditarians, biomedicine, psychology, and even anthropology could benefit from a more ethnographically informed analysis of twins and twinship. Western twins researchers admit that their samples come from largely middle-class Western populations, but share with many Western researchers the notion of the West versus the Rest, where others have a culture but we do not. They tend to take their own culture as a given. They view “culturally informed” analyses as suitable for “other cultures” but not their own.
Throughout and within the chapters of this book, I will compare and contrast the voices of twins themselves to those who research them. Except for Stewart’s (2003) prolegomenon for a social analysis of twinship, there has been little by way of an informed cultural critique or assessment that challenges as culture-bound many of the so-called objective assumptions of primarily Western twins researchers. This leaves twins researchers blind to the variation in constructions of self and personhood, both across societies and within any specific society, as well as to cultural biases inherent in their models of biological positivism. Moreover, in science and
