Twins Talk: What Twins Tell Us about Person, Self, and Society

385 Pages·2015·4.46 MB·English

by  Dona Lee Davis

Twins
Talk
What Twins Tell Us about Person, Self, and Society
Dona Lee Davis
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS ATHENS, OHIO

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davis, Dona Lee, 1948–
Twins talk : what twins tell us about person, self, and society / Dona Lee Davis.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8214-2111-6 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8214-2112-3 (pb) — ISBN
978-0-8214-4499-3 (pdf)
1. Twins—United States. 2. Twins—Social aspects—United States. 3.
Ethnology. I. Title.
GN63.6.D38 2015
306.8750973—dc23
2014029923
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea of studying twins grew out of my experiences in giving a series of
lectures on embodiment, self, and society at the University of Tromsø in
Norway in the 1990s. During that time there was a considerable controversy
among the indigenous Norwegian Sami people and representatives of the
Human Genome Diversity Project. The controversies whet my curiosity
about the relationships between genes and identity, but in a way that was
much closer to home—the home of my own body. A study of twins
promised to offer some interesting insights into many intersecting planes of
experience and analysis, among which are body/biology, personal/social
identity, relatedness/relationality, and culture. The two-day research
opportunities offered at the Twinsburg, Ohio, Twins Days Festival made it
all seem feasible. After having done fieldwork among fishers in
Newfoundland and northern Norway, I found the prospect of conducting a
study in an area where I had an insider’s perspective based on my own
lifetime of firsthand experiences of being a twin—of finally becoming a
local expert—very inviting. Twins Talk as an exercise in quick ethnography
was also developed as a way for my identical twin sister, Dorothy, and me
to spend some time together. My intent at its most ambitious was to present
some conference papers and perhaps an article or two. I had not anticipated
how interesting twins would be to think with, and what started as a short-
term project evolved into a much more involved endeavor.
As I became a twin researcher myself and became more and more
immersed in the popular and scientific twin literature, I was put off by the
predominating biological and genetic essentialism of twin research and the
inherent pathologization of twinship or the twin relationship, most
prominently in psychology but in other disciplines as well. Identical twins
are variously depicted as clones, as a self and almost self inside the same
physical package, and as a single unit or closed society of two. These
characterizations seem to have minimal relevance to my own more than six
decades of being a twin. What did resonate with my anthropological
curiosity, however, were the contentions that identical twins are an
unsettling presence that undermines a sense of uniqueness or challenges
characterizations of selfhood in the wider (Western) society. My goal
became twofold: First, to explicate just what those assumptions or
characterization of selfhood were. And second, to provide a voice for twins
in this process. Thus it is the intent of Twins Talk to quite literally address
what twins tell us about the experience of being twins in Western society.
And in turn, Twins Talk becomes a vehicle for comparing twins’ own
narratives of their being in the world to the narratives of those who have
made twins topics of research. In the process, there emerges a very rich and
rewarding source for informed anthropological analysis as it intersects with
multiple other disciplines.
Many people over the years have helped with this Twins Talk Study. I
would like to thank the Department of Social Anthropology at the
University of Tromsø in Norway (now the Arctic University of Norway)
and the Twins Days Festival Committee for their research grants that
helped fund this study. The University of South Dakota (USD) Tuve Fund
provided travel funds for Kristi Cody, the projects research assistant, as
well as travel funds that enabled Dona to present papers at a number of
professional conferences. Kristi Cody, an anthropology major at USD, was
an enthusiastic and energetic research assistant. Sandy Miller and the Twins
Days Festival Committee provided invaluable help and encouragement
during the initial stages of this study. Angela Harrison successfully took on
the challenging job of transcribing many hours of taped four-way
conversations. Evie Clerx, Danielle Emond, Elizabeth Johnson, and, all
USD undergraduate students, have also worked with me on this project.
Thanks also go to Jane Nadel-Klein, Gisli Pálsson, Barbara Prainsack, and
Elizabeth Stewart for their encouragement and support of the project. Of
course, special thanks go to the forty-four twins who participated in the
Twinsburg Twins Talk Study, taking the time to sit down and share their
lives and experiences of being twins. I hope they enjoyed these
conversations. I certainly did. Their stories helped confirm how interesting
and wonderful it is to be a twin. Extra special thanks to my twin sister,
Dorothy Davis, who played an essential role in the data gathering and
attended three festivals with me. It was the first time in our lives that we
had the opportunity to talk as twins to twins. Finally, thanks to Richard
Whitten, my life partner, whose love and support I will always treasure.

1: TWINSCAPES
A Sufi teaching story tells of the holy fool Mulla Nasrudin who ventured to a strange city.
Before he left on his journey, his wife put a sign around his neck with his name on it so that he
would not forget his identity. When he arrived, he spent the first night at a caravanserai; while he
slept, a joker took the sign and put it around his own neck. When the Mulla awoke, he was
appalled to find his name tag on the joker’s chest. “It seems,” he cried, “that you are me. But if
you are me, then who am I?”
—Lindholm 2001
Each individual is biologically unique.
—Pálsson 2007
What would it be like to have lived one’s whole life without ever having seen your own face?
—Herdt 1999
Like Charles Lindholm, I begin my book with a fool’s tale. Lindholm
(2001, 3) places the Sufi story at the very beginning of his book Culture
and Identity, in chapter 1, titled “Who Am I? The Search for the Self.” He
comments that although the Mulla’s dilemma is “ridiculous,” it nonetheless
raises central issues concerning the development of a more culturally
sensitive or nuanced understanding of one’s sense of someoneness, or
identity. The physical body, perceptions of self in relation to other selves,
and self as positioned or situated and acting within a wider cultural milieu
are all essential components of one’s sense of self (de Munck 2000; Markus
et al. 1997). Yet, if you are an identical twin, Mulla’s “ridiculous” dilemma
becomes a kind of double entendre. In the case of identical twins, the fool’s
tale becomes real. There actually is someone else who is wearing the visual
signs of your identity on their face and body. Twins’ physical similarities