‘Rhodes Students Love to Get Drunk’: Race, Ritual and the Legitimation of the Authentic Rhodes Student

South African universities have been in the spotlight for incidents of racism. At Rhodes University, racist utterances on the university's online discussion forums led to the use of these being temporarily suspended in 2006. However, racist utterances and incidents do not by themselves provide an understanding of the creation of an institutional space as racially marked. This article explores the practice and performance of ‘drinking culture’ within student life at Rhodes, as productive of an authentic and essentialised institutional identity that works to do more than separate drinkers from non-drinkers. Using insights from Bourdieu, the article explores ‘drinking culture’ at Rhodes as the ritualistic institution of social identity functioning to reproduce social difference and racial order.