Paper short abstract:

Using auto- and co-biographical memory narratives from case studies, we offer a microanalysis of twin’s(s’) individual and paired childhood memories of formative moments of their twinship. As twins reflect on their lives together a key theme that emerges is a self-defining moment or dualing of their identities.

Paper long abstract:

Twins, because of their juxtaposed lives in infancy, childhood and adolescence, are assumed both to have earlier memories and to have more shared memories than singletons. Yet, the memory literature on twins treats memory only as a measurable ‘capacity,’ and shows no concern for the ‘content’ or negotiation of memory. Using auto- and co-biographical memory narratives from case studies, we offer a microanalysis of twin’s(s’) individual and paired memories of formative moments in their twinship. As twins reflect on their lives together, a common theme that emerges in their life stories is a self defining moment or episode; we term as a ‘dualing’ of identities. It is a point of realization that, despite their embodied likeness and shared environment, they are different and these differences will become more and more meaningful in later life. As anthropologists and identical twins, we use our own experience and memories as an ethnographic resource to reflect on the development of our own self- determination narratives. Thus, the very process of writing this piece becomes an action of self-making that enacts the very dynamic we seek to analyze. Comparing and contrasting our own experiences to those of other sets of twins, we conclude that, as twins, our shared experiences of being anomalies in our own culture shows not only how memory acts as the presenting of the past but also how the process and content of memory is shaped in a family context. The study contributes to the memory literature at four of its weakest links by characterizing memory as 1) material and embodied; 2) social action and interaction; 3) shaped by social and cultural process; 4) and as dyadic, as well as, self contained.