Twinkind: The Singular Significance of Twins

Viney (Waste), a research associate at Imperial College London, contends in this scintillating study that throughout history and across cultures, “twins have been used to measure standards and project old and new norms for what humans are capable of doing.” According to the author, twins have delineated “positions of power” (in Genesis, God informs Rebecca, pregnant with Jacob and Esau, that “two nations are in your womb... one people will be stronger than the other”); contrasted “godly charisma and human ordinariness” (including in myths about mortal Iphicles and his demigod twin Heracles); and symbolized the strange, aberrant, or otherworldly. In 18th- and 19th-century West Africa, twins born to Yoruban mothers were regarded as a “supernatural curse,” while the 19th-century Western narrative tradition produced the doppelgänger “to handle the incredible strangeness of dual persons at once more and less human.” Elsewhere, Viney documents how twins have been used as medical subjects, a practice popularized by late 19th- and early 20th-century British eugenicist Francis Galton, who studied twins to determine the relative effects of nature and nurture. Viney draws on a dizzying array of articles, anecdotes, and myths (including plenty of non-Western examples), and enriches the narrative with striking photos. It’s a meticulous inquiry into a subject of perennial fascination. (Jan.)