Bricolage

Lévi-Strauss and Bricolage

Lévi-Strauss challenged the ontological basis of binary opposition—such as between nature and culture—arguing that the lines between them, contrary to scientific thinking, are difficult to define. The hypotheticodeductive take on scientific investigation rests on binary logic. Lévi-Strauss's concern was to find a methodological, rather than an ontological, use of binary theory in social science; hence, bricolage. In his 1962, and arguably most important, book, The Savage Mind (the untranslatable original French title was La Pensée Sauvage ), he introduced the terms bricolage and bricoleur into cultural discourse in the context of describing, as he saw it, the two equally valid forms of thinking that he perceived as being possible for the acquisition of knowledge: the science of the concrete, which is mythical thought, and the science of the conceptual, modern scientific inquiry.

The former, of which he suggests that the construction of mythological narrative—storytelling—is an example, involves bricolage insofar as the bricoleur collects, in this instance, the components of the myth which, in a sense, are already a given within cultural and linguistic history and which thereby limit the possibilities open to the bricoleur in (re)constructing the narrative. He suggests engineering, by contrast, as an example of the latter—the science of the conceptual—where, according to Lévi-Strauss, the engineer looks beyond the given in the search of new concepts; the engineer asks questions of the very makeup of the cosmos, whereas the bricoleur is limited by what is within the existing realms of discourse and culture. The engineer works through concepts, and the bricoleur through signs. The bricoleur—the original French word means the highly skilled, professional do-it-yourself craftsman—takes materials from a variety of sources and uses them to create an artifact that, because of how she arranges or manipulates these materials to fit her vision, becomes her own. The bricoleur, says [Page 72]Lévi-Strauss, is therefore someone who uses the means that are at hand, the objects and tools that she finds available to her, those which are already present, and, crucially, which have not been designed or imagined with a view to the particular use to which they will be used. The bricoleur tries by experimentation, by trial and error, to adapt them, willing to change them, if that seems necessary, or simultaneously to incorporate more than one, even if their forms and their origins are heterogeneous.

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