“It Was, Ugh, It Was So Gnarly. And I Kept Going”: The Cultural Significance of Scars in the Workplace

Centering on the symbolic meanings of unintended work-related scars in occupational settings, this article examines how in certain professions scars produced through painful mistakes are leveraged into workplace advantage. This finding—derived from body-anchored interviews with commercial chefs and cooks (n = 50) and embodied ethnography of a casual restaurant-bar in the USA—is counterintuitive, as scars acquired from error conventionally represent failure, naivete, or lack of skill. This paradox hinges on the values of the macro-level cultures and idiocultures of particular workspaces. In the context of commercial kitchen culture, where stoic suffering is prized, physical marks from injuries that are then expounded upon by corporeal storytelling and other forms of cultural bodily markings challenge conventional notions and become advantageous and meaning-laden. Ultimately, this article expands the understanding of the uses of unintentional scars within the framework of workplace idiocultures through an intimate, embodied lens.