In the early 1970s, an airplane carrying forty members of an amateur rugby team

crashed in the Andes Mountains in South America. The twenty-seven survivors were
marooned at 12,000 feet in freezing weather and deep snow. There was no food except for a
small amount of chocolate and some wine. A few days after the crash, the group heard on a
small transistor radio that the search for them had been called off.
Scattered in the snow were the frozen bodies of dead passengers. Preserved by the
freezing weather, these bodies became, after a time, sources of food. At first, the survivors
were repulsed by the idea of eating human flesh, but as the days wore on, they agonized over
the decision about whether to eat the dead crash victims, eventually concluding that they had
to eat if they were to live.
In the beginning, only a few ate the human meat, but soon the others began to eat too.
The group experimented with preparations as they tried different parts of the body. They
developed elaborate rules about how, what, and whom they would eat. Some could not bring
themselves to cut the meat from the human body, but would slice it once someone else had
cut off large chunks. They all refused to eat certain parts—the lungs, skin, head, and genitals.
After two months, the group sent out an expedition of three survivors to find help. The
group was rescued, and the world learned of their ordeal. Their cannibalism (the eating of
other human beings) was generally accepted as something they had to do to survive. Although
people might have been repulsed by the story, the survivors’ behavior was understood as a
necessary adaptation to their life-threatening circumstances. The survivors also maintained a
sense of themselves as good people even though what they did profoundly violated ordinary
standards of socially acceptable behavior in most cultures in the world (Read 1974; Miller
1991; Henslin 1993).

QUESTION:
1. Was the behavior of the Andes crash survivors socially deviant?
2. Were the people made crazy by their experience, or was this a normal response to
extreme circumstances?

Compare the Andes crash to another case of human cannibalism. In 1991, in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, Jeffrey Dahmer pled guilty to charges of murdering at least fifteen men in his
home. Dahmer lured the men—eight of them African American, two White, and one a
fourteen year- old Laotian (Asian) boy—to his apartment, where he murdered and
dismembered them, then cooked and ate some of their body parts. For those he considered
most handsome, he boiled the flesh from their heads so that he could save and admire their
skulls. Dahmer was seen as a total social deviant, someone who violated every principle of
human decency. Even hardened criminals were disgusted by Dahmer. In fact, he was killed in
prison by another inmate in 1994.

QUESTION:
3. Why was Dahmer’s behavior considered so deviant when that of the Andes survivors
was not?

The answer can be found by looking at the situation in which these behaviors occurred. For
the Andes survivors, eating human flesh was essential for survival. For Dahmer, however, it
was murder. From a sociological perspective, the deviance
of cannibalism resides not just in the act itself but also in the social context in which it occurs.
The exact same behavior—eating other human beings—is considered reprehensible in one
context and acceptable in another. That is the essence of the sociological explanation: The
nature of deviance is not only in the personality of the deviant person, nor is it inherently in
the deviant act itself, but instead it is a significant part and product of the social structure.