From the Archives: Researchers have long viewed identical twins as mutants, oddballs, and freaks. Bothered by a biased scientific literature, two anthropologists who are also identical twins conduct their own twin ethnographic research.
My twin sister Dorothy Davis takes me to her yoga class and introduces me to her instructor. We stand side by side and smile idiotically as she looks us over and says, “Wow, you really are identical.”
Our aim has been to study twinship as a normal form of human experience—rather than as deviant or dysfunctional compared to the experiences of singletons. We wanted to identify key cultural themes that shape the experiences of twins but that are largely ignored by researchers. In 2014, I published the results of our research in my book Twins Talk.
By contrast, most of the attention that the medical literature dedicates to twins is warranted and helpful. Gestation and birth are more complex and risky for twin babies and their mothers than for singletons. The health consequences of premature birth—nearly 60 percent of twins are born premature—are valid issues to address, especially as new reproductive technologies are resulting in higher twinning rates. However, biologically healthy twins receive short shrift in the medical literature.
None of us—neither Dorothy, Kristi, nor I—anticipated the impact we felt mixing with hundreds of pairs of twins, most of them dressed identically and celebrating their twinship. Kristi felt she had entered an episode of The X-Files. Dorothy and I were as shocked as Kristi. Being in the midst of so many twins who celebrated their twinship by emphasizing their likeness evoked a visceral response—grown adults should not be doing this, we said to each other.
The scientific literature, on the other hand, is dominated by Western egocentric notions of the self. The view that the self is a private, bounded, unique center of awareness—a one that stands in contrast to others—is taken for granted. Twin researchers fail to see how that view is formed by culture and history; indeed, the socially constructed nature of it goes wholly unrecognized and unexamined.
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