Understanding deviance, survival, and social context in eating friends

Ethics - Deviance

"Eating your Friends is the Hardest: The Survivors of the F-227" by James M. Henslin discusses the ways in which reality is created by society and groups within it. The unique life-or-death situation of the Andes Mountain plane crash survivors shows how a group can be compelled to redefine deviant behavior to make it acceptable and even holy. By examining this group's situation, Henslin is able to define a number of lessons about social reality.

"Eating your Friends is the Hardest: The Survivors of the F-227" by James M. Henslin discusses the ways in which reality is created by examining a unique but disturbing situation. This situation, in which some humans survived a plane crash in the Andes Mountains, were stranded in the Mountains for more than 2 months and were literally starving to death with no food source except human corpses, gave Henslin a unique opportunity to observe how humans define and redefine reality in order to survive. The rugby team, their friends and relatives who were in the plane crash came from civilized Uruguayan society, with basic necessities for survival, including food, and human corpses are not considered food in civilized Uruguay. In fact, eating human corpses (cannibalism) was considered seriously deviant in their usual reality. The fact that these stranded and starving humans took so long to even consider eating human corpses shows how strongly they believed that cannibalism is seriously deviant behavior. However, the crash survivors were thrown into a situation without the basic necessity of food, as they watched themselves dwindle from 27 survivors to only 16 survivors within 70 days. In order to survive, they began to redefine their reality and the meanings of cannibalism and deviance within it. At first, some of the group ate the human meat but others would not. However, after they learned that the air force had called off the search and they would have to save themselves, which they could not do if too weak, more of the group ate the human meat. Eventually, all the crash survivors ate the corpses in order to survive. Also, when they were rescued and news of their cannibalism leaked out in the press, they explained that they had a duty to survive, that they did not kill the people in order to eat their corpses, that the corpses were their only source of food, and that God provided the corpses as food and Holy Communion. Finally, when some members of the group wanted to confess to their Roman Catholic priests, the priests said that the group members had nothing to confess because they had done nothing wrong.