By telling the story of an agricultural university in Peru, this article shows how a specific professional formation forges a strong linkage between engineering and masculine identities in water management. Although these identities come to be seen as self-evident or even natural, they are the outcome of diverse, repeated, and ritualized performances as part of the everyday life of the university. Through collectively enacting and experiencing such cultural performances, engineering students are trained to do science and technology in specific ways, ways that embody particularly masculine symbolic repertoires. On becoming part of a professional society, through rites of passage such as hazing and field work, students simultaneously learn to behave as engineers and become ‘real’ men. Building on and sometimes actively re-working existing societal markers of hierarchy and difference, male engineers in this process distinguish themselves from non-engineers, women and ‘other’ men. With careful interviewing and observation of agricultural engineers, the article suggests an interpretive framework to analyse the multiple cultural and performative repertoires that ‘engineer’ specific masculinities.

通过讲述秘鲁一所农业大学的故事，本文显示了特定的专业队伍如何在水资源管理中的工程学和男性身份之间建立牢固的联系。尽管这些身份被认为是不言而喻的，甚至是自然的，但它们是大学日常生活中多样，重复和仪式化表演的结果。通过集体表演和体验这种文化表演，工程专业的学生将接受以特定方式进行科学和技术培训的方式，这些方式体现了特别男性化的象征性曲目。在成为职业社会的一员之后，通过诸如狂欢和野外工作之类的仪式，学生们同时学会了以工程师的身份行事并成为“真正的”男人。在有时甚至是在积极地改造现有的等级和差异的社会标志的基础上，男性工程师在这一过程中与非工程师，女性和“其他”男性区分开来。通过对农业工程师的认真采访和观察，本文提出了一个解释框架，以分析“工程”特定男性气质的多种文化和表演曲目。