This book's subtitle could well be—not intended, strictly speaking, as an homage to Claude Levi-Strauss—“twins are good to think.” The book's sixteen excellent essays are not so much about the lives of actual human twins, a subject that is only briefly discussed in a few chapters, but rather about African ideas concerning twins as they relate to broader conceptions of the cosmos, the social order, and humans’ place within it.
In the introduction, editor Philip Peek reviews some prior literature on African twins, focusing mainly on twentieth century anthropological literature and more recent work. He (and later in the volume, Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers) discusses E.E. Evans Pritchard's writings on the Nuer, where twins are the symbolic equivalents to birds. Like snakes, mentioned in many of the essays, birds and twins straddle two worlds—earth and sky, human and spirit. Peek also notes the contribution of Victor Turner who, like many other social...