fault lines, deviating from conventional expectations of identity. They are celebrators of the uncanny. Through their narratives, twins draw on their own experiences as they formulate a sense of self. Yet their self-stories enact both their uniqueness and their shared commonalities with the culture in which they participate. Thus in Twins Talk we will see how confronting existing schema and airing doubts (Ochs and Capps 2001) may lead to a recognition of diverse psychologies, as well as explanatory theories or envisaging alternatives that reevaluate and reformulate what culture has to offer, and also how self and culture dynamically constitute each other.
Narrative analysis—as a specialized area of linguistics or cognitive anthropology—can be highly sophisticated and complex (e.g., Nelson 1994; Ochs and Caps 2001). Preferring the term talk over discourse or narrative, Naomi Quinn (2005a, 2005b) advocates the use of eclectic, open-ended, and opportunistic research methods. For Quinn, talk entails interviews that capture and record (for transcription) segments of speech or text that are longer than a single word or a sentence and that often tell full stories. In Quinn’s view, cultural analysis of talk can be done by anyone with the patience for close, attention-demanding, time-consuming work and an eye for pattern, detail, and nuance. Individual researchers may develop their own personal approaches, finding what works for their own purposes and inventing forms of analysis in the process (Quinn 2005b). Cultural analysis in this sense aims at finding patterns or clues drawn from comparison of multiple samples of discourse. It entails making explicit the largely tacit, taken-for-granted, implicit, and invisible assumptions that people share with others of their group or carry internally. Understanding culture through talk begins with the assumption that people in a given group share, to a greater or lesser extent, largely tacit understandings of the world that they have learned and internalized.
Yet Twins Talk departs from Quinn’s (2005b) design for talk research methods in a number of important ways. First, talk, according to Quinn, is collected through interviews or conversations between two people, one of whom does not belong to the immediate social world of the other. The narrative data from the Twins Talk Study involve conversations among at least four, and in one case six, people. Data come from a set of twins having conversations about being twins with other sets of twins. Being twins themselves, the researchers do share many key aspects of the relational and social worlds (not to mention embodied worlds) of those with whom they are talking. The data have an interactive quality that is unique not only in the twin studies literature but also in the discourse analysis literature. Second, the Twins Talk Study goes well beyond words transcribed into text. To reduce twin self stylings or self work to verbal abstractions denies the real-world importance of their bodies. I must admit to being amazed that, to the extent a cultural psychology approach assumes an embodied self (Markus et al. 1997, 13), the selfways, self styling, and self work of identical twins have to this point received no attention. For identical twins, the body counts, especially as they sit side by side, enacting, performing, and discussing being twins with another set of twins. Third, the festival context of the twins talk sessions is extremely important. Festivals are celebrations of twinship, and our talking partners come to the Research Pavilion hyped on being twins. Twins festivals are all about simultaneously performing and challenging popular cultural stereotypes of twins as being identical. If only for two or three days, a festival becomes a place where twins dominate, and singletons, with their biological uniqueness, become the exotic other. In the following, I set the scene for the Twins Talk Study by introducing the talking partners and some key features of the contexts of each research venue.
Inside the Twins Days Pavilion
The narratives that flow throughout and structure this book were gathered from a sample of twenty-three sets of twins attending the Twinsburg Twins Days Festival during the summer of 2003. Twins Days is unique among twins festivals in having space on the festival grounds for twins researchers who may recruit volunteer subjects from the masses of twins who attend the festival. Every year the research committee of the Twins Days Festival accepts formal applications from researchers interested in recruiting volunteer subjects. Researchers are vetted and selected through a process of formal proposal writing. If accepted, researchers are given official space on the festival grounds, for which they pay a fee. To an experienced field researcher, the Twins Days Festival is not only an exercise in quick ethnography (Handwerker 2002) but also a kind of ethnographic nirvana for the talk/interview component of a research project. This is exactly the point for all the Twinsburg researchers. Where else could one find, for two long days, large concentrations of twins representing diverse categories in terms of age, twin type, gender, ethnic identity, and so on?
The Twins Days Festival is held annually during the first week of August in the small town of Twinsburg, Ohio. Dating back to 1976 when thirty-six twins attended, the festival now hosts the largest gathering of twins in the world. Twins Days attracts twins—identical and fraternal twins of both sexes—and super twins (multiples of more than two) from all age groups and different walks of life. Since 1989 the number of registered pairs of twins attending the festival has numbered over two thousand. Twins Days is the predominant twins festival in terms of attendance, national and international attention, and press coverage.
Although more permanent facilities have been built since Dorothy and I participated in 2003, the Research Pavilion at the time consisted of a large tent with booth-like table spaces for twelve groups of researchers. Researchers are a formal presence and must follow rules specified by the festival research committee. For example, all tables must have skirts, and researchers are supposed to be in the same place from the opening of the festival to the close. In 2003 we and ten other research groups competed to entice twins to our table as they milled through the pavilion, looked over the research booths, asked questions about the projects, and decided whether to participate in one or more of the various studies. The research groups that year included National Institute for Deafness (hearing and listening abilities), the Evanston Continence Center (incontinence and pelvic floor problems), a university hospital’s department of dermatology (skin diseases and hair loss), Burke Pharmaceuticals (hair loss), University of Pennsylvania (sleep patterns), Monell Chemical Senses Center (taste tests), University of California–San Diego Department of Orthopedics (physiological conditioning and space flight), U.S. Secret Service (handwriting), Cornell University (altruism), and Western Reserve Reading Project (reading-related cognitive skills). We were billed in the festival program as the University of South Dakota’s qualitative study designed to collect narrative data to identify common themes of twinship. Some groups, composed of cadres of research assistants, processed and tested hundreds of twins. The larger, well-funded research groups come back year after year. We were free to participate in preliminary and evening activities off the festival grounds, but at the festival we were restricted to the Research Pavilion. We conducted interviews in the pavilion for two days from 8:00 a.m. to around 10:00 p.m. In the evenings Dorothy and I were the only researchers left in the pavilion tent. All the others kept a nine-to-five schedule.
A visit to the research tent was a popular activity for many curious and service-minded twins. The day before the festival, when we were setting up our research booth, I had a chat with a man setting up a booth to sell photo buttons to twins. When I mentioned that I was a researcher setting up in the Research Pavilion, he rather sarcastically wished me good luck, stating that twins “in the know” avoided the Research Pavilion like the plague, knowing that once they went in, even though they were promised a quick study, they could actually get stuck there for hours. Fortunately, this proved not to be the case. There was a steady flow of twins through the pavilion during each day of the festival.
Most other researchers in the pavilion had slick booths with big posters, banners, multiple researchers, and flashy technology. The majority offered some form of compensation. Researchers on big teams wore colorful matching T-shirts. Our booth, however, had a homemade or amateurish ambience about it. Dressed somewhat similarly in matching pants (which we had purchased independently) and in different-colored shirts, Dorothy and I sat at a booth we had decorated in red, white, and blue. We had banners strung across the booth that announced us as the Twins Talk Study. Our student research assistant, Kristi Cody, stood at one table, recruiting twins to talk with us, while we conducted our conversations at a table perpendicular to Kristi’s. While we
