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‘Are We One Body?’ Body Boundaries in Telesomatic Experiences

This paper explores the embodiedness of body boundaries in the telesomatic experiences of 20 adult twins. Respondents were recruited through snowball sampling resulting in 16 in-depth face-to-face interviews. Interviews were analysed using an immersion-crystallization approach within a meaning-centred interpretive framework. Respondents often experienced trouble making subject–object distinctions between themselves and their co-twins that often resulted in them posing the question, ‘Are we (myself and my co-twin) one body?’ Their experiences suggest that, sometimes symptoms of one illness are experienced as shared between two people, and their experiences highlight the ethical nature of individualism in western cultures as twins frequently do not view a greater level of attachment to their co-twins as pathological but as something special. We suggest that controversy regarding the ontological status of parapsychological phenomena has resulted in anthropologists being slow to consider these and similar experiences in western cultures as topics worthy of research.