Haggis, Kimchi, and National Identity (Scotland & Korea)
Identity is a fluctuating sense of self-awareness depending on the culture and traditions of lived experiences. The culture that influences identity can range from vernacular to large-scale national culture. The latter is often seen as a force that unites the people of a specific nation. Some of these traditions, such as national food culture, more easily define national identity than others. In Scotland, haggis is a national food that helps define Scottish identity, tradition, and belonging. The importance of haggis stems from various economic, political, and ideological influences.
In a politically powerless nation that wants to maintain or rebuild national identity, specific elements of its culture are often disproportionately developed with a few key stereotyped emblems, including food culture. Food culture has significant relations to traditions and identity. What a community eats defines numerous attributes of its environment, history, beliefs, and practices. It expresses acceptable ingredients, preparation techniques, and procedures regarding mealtime. Food as nutrition is important, but it also illustrates family relations, social values, and human connection. These factors play an essential role in self-identity and a sense of belonging to a group that one feels attached to, especially among those affected by a diaspora. Food remains one of the most accessible ways for emigrants to explore and practice their culture compared to other avenues of tradition, but can also be used maliciously to divide people who do not have the level of citizenship compared to a native person.
Once a sovereign state, Scotland was brought together with England within the United Kingdom through the 1707 Acts of Union. Since then, Scotland has existed as a separate nation within a single state. Shortly after, the Jacobites’ uprising was defeated in 1746, resulting in the Act of Proscription. This forbade Scottish people from wearing Highland garb to assimilate them into British society and suppress future uprisings by removing power from the Clans. However, the new rule continued to allow women and the military to wear tartan with limitations. The military tartan had different designs and the English capture of Highland garb influenced the new association of tartan with affluence rather than rebellion.
The new link between tartan and elites was a key influence in the Act of Proscription being revoked in 1786. Political pressure came from a group of elite English individuals who sought to amplify recent interest in Scottish culture resulting from the popular Romantic movement. The elite’s interest in tartan was further exaggerated by the Royal family’s associations, such as the purchase of the Balmoral estate in 1848. Despite the earlier beliefs that the Highlands were barbaric, the advancement of the Industrial Revolution heightened the romanticism of Scottish exoticness, lost history, and primitive ways of life. The tartan also provided a sense of distinct culture that set Scotland apart from Britain, though much of this iconography was a distorted and romanticized fantasy that presented itself as authentic Scottish culture.
The tartan, a myth created from the appropriation of Highland culture by those in a position of power, evolved into the new commercialized, cultural reality for successive Scottish generations. Tartanry, the stereotyped representation of Scottish culture, became the forefront of Scottish identity and heritage, but it soon became a questionably exaggerated expression of national identity. Despite having a fabricated essence from its onset, tartanry has since lost most of its initial significance. Its emblem images are strewn all over tourist cities, travel brochures, and heritage sites and it is difficult to imagine a version of Scotland without tartan, kilts, and haggis. Tartanry was an important step in Scotland’s search for a culture that allowed a way to represent itself in a position with limited political power. Although these traditions prioritized plausibility over factual evidence, they were easier to uphold because they were created in a way to be deemed ‘valid’ and ‘authentic’ by those who held influence.
In Scotland, the role of haggis became a byproduct of tartanry and food culture. It exemplifies Scotland as a nation, but in a stereotypical way that makes it difficult to separate Scottish identity from being able to prepare and eat the dish. Haggis is utilized as a tool to present Scotland as a separate entity from Britain through Othering by incorporating Scotland’s mystical and rugged ancestry. It draws on the idea of haggis being authentic, exotic, and novel. Although haggis is prepared using the muscles and organs of a lamb, there is also a widely-accepted story, The Tale of The Wild Haggis, of the imaginary animal haggis, which the dish is told to come from. It is intriguing to see the ‘ancestral’ animal’s connection to Scotland’s appeal of wildness and mystery and how the animal plays a central role in encompassing the whole nation. The haggis animal depicted in Robert Burns’ poem portrays the crude disposition associated with the appropriate method of preparation. Suggesting that haggis comes from a non-existent animal and is prepared in a certain way plays with the exoticness and mythical traditions that are essential stakeholders in Scottish identity. In this case, using haggis as national identity is questionable because tartanry culture was fabricated to be a version of ‘acceptable’ authenticity from the beginning and relies too heavily on Scotland’s exoticism.
Food culture is a social construct and its ‘authenticity’ is used as a source to validate someone’s national identity, as well as a lens to judge or appropriate other food cultures. Haggis is designated as something adventurous and daring to try. For visitors, the ability to appreciate the dish shows a willingness to accept Scottish culture, and for residents, it is a measurement of the level of acceptance into Scottish society. The Hairy Bikers show (2011) gives an example of Camila, a Scottish resident of Yemenite origin. She makes haggis samosas to incorporate both cultures. The samosa acts as a representation of herself—the samosa’s outer ‘layer’ portrays her outward appearance as a Yemenite person, while the haggis ‘filling’ defines her inner Scottish identity and gives her a sense of Scottish citizenship and assimilation. However, because she does not ‘look’ Scottish, it would not be apparent without knowing her life that she identifies as Scottish.
Another potential issue with using haggis as national identity is its use to measure Scottishness. National culture exists to be a manifestation of a nation’s morals, but there are certainly several cases of grey zones in moral locations during conflict and complication. However, with food discourse, identity is difficult to measure on a spectrum and is instead seen as black or white. The thing to note about Camila’s samosas is that the haggis filling was store-bought and not made by Camila herself. The idea that the actual preparation of haggis, whether it is served as is or incorporated into another dish, is usually seen as a right delegated to ‘real’ Scottish people (though many ethnic Scots do not actually make haggis from scratch either). However, defining ‘actual’ Scottishness is a grey zone of uncertainty because there is no set of rules that exist to confirm someone’s self-identification. Moreover, how other people perceive and accept someone’s Scottishness depends on many factors, such as their location of birth and upbringing, blood and ancestral ties, and assimilation into Scottish society.
Haggis is also used to analyze the level of Scottishness in people born in Scotland. In one of his TV shows, Gordon Ramsay competes against a non-chef Scottish person in cooking haggis. Ramsay is a world-renowned chef who was also born in Scotland but spent most of his life in England. Compared to the Scottish person, his degree of Scottishness is minimal and this is somehow evident in the final votes. Ramsay’s loss to the ‘actual’ Scottish person suggests that haggis can only be perfected by a ‘real’ Scottish person and that knowing how to cook it depends on Scottish identity instead of expertise. However, research shows that regarding claims to Scottish identity, Scottish nationals generally prefer to claim Scottish birth and upbringing, the birthplace marker. Ramsay was born in Scotland and spent his early years there, which was an important criterion for Scottish nationals in claiming Scottish identity. However, he was not seen as Scottish as the other competitor because of his lived experience in England.
For people like Camila, their immigrant identity can be defined as a spectrum—on one end are people who take pride in being Asian, and on the other end are people who reject anything non-White and see embracing Asian culture as “social suicide”. Although a grey zone of where to draw the line between successful assimilation and cultural preservation always exists, most of these immigrants are comfortable between the two endpoints of the spectrum and embrace different fragments of each culture to various degrees. Furthermore, where one lies on the identity spectrum compared to another person does not influence the discourse in proving that person’s residency and is not as black and white as using food dishes to give someone rights to their identity (though to that individual, where they lie on that spectrum might be the most important factor in their self-identity).
The national food of Korea, kimchi, is similar to haggis because it is also used as a source of building, maintaining, and measuring Korean identity. Like Scotland, Korea was left with limited political autonomy during decades of imperial colonization under Japan and exploitation by the United States for its anti-communist agenda. To rebuild its unique identity, Korea used kimchi as one of its cultural emblems to differentiate itself from other neighboring countries. Korea has experienced widespread diaspora as well, and many migrants use kimchi to verify how Korean someone is. The Korean heritage industry also exploits a small number of traditional emblems similar to what tartanry does of Scottish culture—a Korean is not truly Korean without eating kimchi, wearing hanbok, or knowing Chinese characters. Abandoning kimchi is then seen as a source of national identity crisis. Furthermore, kimchi, like haggis, is seen as ‘different’ and ‘exotic’. It is pungent and off-putting to foreigners because of its method of preparation but is something that Koreans are expected to be attached to. For foreigners, it is used as a test of their willingness to embrace Korean traditions, and for Korean nationals, it is used as a measurement of their Koreanness. Making kimchi is a laborious process and part of many family traditions, usually reserved for actual Korean people. A non-Korean person making kimchi would certainly raise eyebrows, but a non-Korean person buying store-bought kimchi and using that in a separate dish would simply be seen as appreciating Korean culture.
Although they have a similar background of using food culture as national identity, Korea was able to build new markers of tradition through the rise of K-pop. The global rise in Korean media, called the Hallyu Wave, created a solid foundation for Korea’s new identity that does not solely rely on traditions from the past. Nowadays, a Korean person may identify as Korean in other ways besides kimchi. The Hallyu Wave, however, was carefully designed with economic support and political agenda in mind by the Korean government to create a modern Korean identity. This level of support is something that Scotland lacks because the UK government is still centralized in Westminster. The devolution of Scotland and increase in heritage industry has aided Scotland’s process of reclaiming its own national identity, but the search for the ‘real’ Scottish culture will always lead back to historical excavation of the 'golden age' several centuries ago in an attempt to rebuild a pure national identity devoid of outside influences and relies on celebrating its past from the Romantic movement. Unlike Korea, which only lacked political sovereignty for a few decades, Scotland has lost formal statehood for several centuries. Thus, it is easier for Scotland to uphold traditions, such as food culture, that originate from the
Romantic movement instead of creating more modern traditions that encapsulate its current residents better.
The comparison of Scottishness raises questions such as how long someone has to grow up in Scotland to be considered truly Scottish or if formative or adolescent years matter more in upbringing. Furthermore, the comparison fails to consider Scottish people of other ethnic origins. How should one compare haggis made by an ethnically Asian person to haggis made by a white person if they were both born and raised in Scotland?
Using food traditions as a signifier of national identity is less accessible to people from other ethnic backgrounds. The globalization of national food dishes can be referred to as a support for the local people because of the creative new inventions that come with new fusion dishes. However, using haggis as a test to separate the ‘non-authentic’ people who identify as Scottish or Scottish people of other ethnic origins can essentially hinder the development of modern Scottish culture and identity.
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