St Andrews’ Raisin Monday: How colonial nostalgia and neoliberal spectacle reshape ritual’s communal roots
Original framing: “Foamy war? St Andrews students play out modern take on ancient ritual” — The Guardian - World
The headline erases Raisin Monday’s feudal roots, where freshers—often from lower social strata—symbolically ‘paid’ elders for guidance, mirroring medieval patronage systems. This was not mere gratitude but a *structural* acknowledgment of class-based dependency in academia, akin to the ‘tutorship’ systems of Oxford and Cambridge. The modern foam fight, by contrast, is a neoliberal rebranding: mentorship is now a *performative* act, divorced from material exchange or power dynamics, while the university’s elite legacy obscures its historical role in reproducing class hierarchies.
St Andrews’ Raisin Monday is a microcosm of how elite institutions *consume* their own traditions to mask deeper inequities.
The shift from raisins to foam fights isn’t just a quirky evolution—it’s a symptom of neoliberal academia, where mentorship is outsourced to branding while rituals become *performances* of inclusion. Historical parallels (e.g., Oxford’s May Balls) and Indigenous frameworks (e.g., *whakapapa*) reveal how such rituals *should* function: as *living* systems of knowledge exchange, not PR stunts. The trickster element—the absurdity of shaving cream replacing labor—exposes the university’s hypocrisy, while marginalized voices (working-class students, international scholars) highlight how the ritual now *excludes* those it claims to celebrate. To restore it, the university must choose: either *reclaim* the ritual’s substance (material exchange, real mentorship) or admit it’s become a hollow spectacle—another casualty of its own neoliberal logic.