Mortal Rituals: What the Story of the Andes Survivors Tells Us About Human Evolution

by Matt J. Rossano

On December 21, 1972, sixteen young survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 were rescued after spending ten weeks stranded at the crash site of their plane, high in the remote Andes Mountains. The incident made international headlines and spawned several best-selling books, fueled partly by the fact that the young men had resorted to cannibalism to survive.

Matt Rossano examines this story from an evolutionary perspective, weaving together findings and ideas from anthropology, psychology, religion, and cognitive science. During their ordeal, these young men broke "civilized" taboos to fend off starvation and abandoned "civilized" modes of thinking to maintain social unity and individual sanity. Through the power of ritual, the survivors were able to endure severe emotional and physical hardship. Rossano ties their story to our story, seeing in the mortal rituals of this struggle for survival a reflection of what it means to be human.

Genres: Anthropology, Psychology

248 pages, Hardcover

First published July 23, 2013

About the author

Credited in older publications as Matthew J. Rossano.

Reviews

[Darren · Rating 4 out of 5]

An aircraft crash in a remote area, survivors left undiscovered for 10 weeks, cannibalism and much more besides. This is the grisly if not gripping story in this book that looks behind what happened from an evolutionary perspective to discover what it can really mean to be human.

The author carefully weaves together a number of findings and thoughts taken from the various fields of academia to come forward with a belief of how and why the survivors survived. It is not a religious-orientated "God's Will" sort of conclusion but an interesting mixture of circumstance, experience, determination and perhaps good fortune. Small things possibly helped play their part, such as the survivors being known to each other and members of the same rugby team, whilst other factors were more ingrained, more basic, subconsciously taken from our collective past.

Teamwork, a hierarchy, a sense of urgency, survival and leadership all contributed as well, helping mask (rather than overcome) the sense of loss, of sorrow and desperation. Necessity was the keyword in a desperate attempt to survive that possibly led to the unpalatable breaking of one of society's strongest taboos - cannibalism.

But despite the icky-ness of the headline subject, this book is no gore-fest. It is a sensible, articulate look at a subject through a mature, measured prism. As much as one can "benefit" from what happened, perhaps we are able to in any case get a slightly better understanding at what makes mankind tick in extreme situations, where help is not just a call away, where one really has just deal with what is in front of them. Of course, aircraft still crash, but thankfully technological advances may mean that there would be no similar occurrence in the future. One can and must learn from the past and this book gives a great insight into matters.

Whilst this book features the crash as the central plank of its consideration, it is not about the crash. There are many other books that deal with that. The crash was the catalyst to what happened afterwards and that is the focus.

This is a book written predominantly for an academic audience and features a mass of bibliographic references and sources for further research and consideration. Yet thankfully it has been written in a fairly accessible text so that the more curious "average" reader can follow along with. One doesn't want to trivialise or downplay the seriousness of this book but it is accessible and gripping like a good novel, yet the content is more real, more considerate and based purely in fact. This book deserves a wider audience and hopefully the price (before any discounting) will not be off-putting to the broader market. Some of the detail might be mentally skipped over by the generalist reader, but the essential core message and thoughts will surely be glued permanently into the consciousness of the reader. That is the sign of a good book and this is a great example of a good book.

Mortal Rituals, written by Matt J. Rossano and published by Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780231165006, 256 pages. Typical price: USD29.95. YYYY.

[Mich · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far this is the most unique among all the Andes books I've read so far. It focuses on the social, evolutionary, and anthropological perspectives that aim to shed light on the Andes story. The book reads more like a research paper than a simple retelling of the events in the mountain (and in essence, it really is a research paper, and a well-supported one at that). If scholarly papers are your thing, this book is for you.

[G · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn't finish this book. It is so not what I thought it was about. I read through about 30 percent and couldn't read another page. I wanted to read about the crash and the survivors but there was little to nothing about that.

[Arcadia Shanklin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Such a disappointment. Too much irrelevant nonsense and focus on other, less interesting events. I found most of Matt J Rossano’s conclusions pointless at best and insulting to the Survivors, at worst.

I have amassed every book published on this event (of the 13 written in English or the available English translations, including “Survive!” a book so rare I can’t even find it on Goodread) and 1/13 of these have been excellent. Mortal Rituals stands alone as unreadable for me. I tried to push through but when I got to the middle, exactly 100 pages in, I had to stop.

This book hardly belongs in the library of 1972 Uruguayan Flight 571 crash and survival literature. Its most astonishing contribution to the subject is the ability to make the singular most compelling story of all time a truly boring read. I’m shocked this author was able to get a blurb from survivor Eduardo Strauch, granted it’s only two sentences. But still!

If you’d like to dive deeper into this event, I recommend any of the six memoirs by survivors (currently published at the time of this review) or any of three definitive texts: Alive, To Play the Game, Society of the Snow . Forget about Mortal Rituals. You’re welcome.