Bricolage

As religious beliefs and practices intermingle within a global context, a variety of unanticipated phenomena emerge—phenomena not necessarily representative of their original form or intended use. The term bricolage is used within a variety of social sciences as a descriptive term to characterize the process of improvisation in production. Derived from the French verb bricoler, bricolage refers to the process of creating something by one's own means through the use of available materials.

The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used the term bricolage to describe improvised patterns of mythological thinking. In his seminal study based on ideas of structuralism titled The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss found imagination, and by extension experience, to be a source of mythological thought—attributing the production of this thinking to bricolage.

Examples of bricolage were observed among the Cargo Cults of the Oceania regions during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These Cargo Cults were made up of local natives who were, for the first time, interacting with material culture, or cargo, from the Western world. During World War II, the Japanese military transported cargo through this region, which made for some of the first encounters with modern technologies. Members of these cults were thought to have believed that the cargo was created by their deities or ancestors and needed to be repossessed from these foreigners. In what appeared to be an attempt to reclaim these goods, members of the Cargo Cults reportedly crafted material goods that resembled the foreigners’ possessions and to some extent imitated their [Page 161]behaviors. An instance of this activity was demonstrated by the building of makeshift landing strips for airplanes and headsets carved from local materials to reproduce what the cults had witnessed in the presence of these foreign peoples. The Cargo Cults could be said to have engaged in bricolage by creating a mythology of sorts from the available goods and experiences they encountered.

Particularly germane to theoretical perspectives such as the Sacred Canopy and Spiritual Marketplace, bricolage may also be used metaphorically to describe the type of religious shopping that takes place in the global sphere of available religious beliefs and practices. New religious movements such as the International Raëlian movement—which borrows from a host of ideas found within Judaism, Christianity, and the UFO (unidentified flying object) cults—and the Church of Scientology—which appropriates fragments of proto-scientific gadgets and self-help reasoning—are both examples of global religions that have used bricolage as a form of mythological thinking.