Twins Talk

Dona Lee Davis earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently a professor of anthropology at the University of South Dakota. Her research interests include medical and psychological anthropology, gender studies, research methods, North Atlantic fishing communities, and multispecies ethnography.

"Twins as well as students of anthropology, sociology, and psychology will enjoy this study that differs from others in its blend of personal experiences and scholarship." (Library Journal) "Davis's affective, autoethnographic proximity to her interviewees is at once an engaging and revealing feature of this book. … Twins Talk is an invaluable record of a particularly voluble minority of festival-going twins who are willing, eager, and capable of presenting themselves as talking twins, sympathetic to their biographies being raised to anthropological significance." (American Anthropologist) "Twins Talk … is a valuable and much needed contribution to scholarly work on twins. It suggests intriguing new directions for anthropological research on a topic that has been predominantly explored from biomedical and psychological perspectives. … With this book, Davis gives a compelling demonstration of the value of studying twins as twins, and shows that twins' life stories—not just their genomes—are rich with meaning and worthy of analysis." (Medical Anthropology Quarterly) "Dona Lee Davis adds the perspective of identical twins to the domain of 'twins research,' which is mostly research on twins. In her book, she presents the voices of twins, with their always interesting, often entertaining, and at times upsetting stories, views, and accounts of their lives alone and with each other." "Dona Lee Davis, an established anthropologist and identical twin, offers an insightful critical and cultural analysis of twin research and twinship while highlighting what twins tell us about our 'selves.' Most importantly the voices of twins are heard loud and clear."