Bricolage and Bricoleur

The French terms bricolage and bricoleur were given their key academic sense by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and were subsequently taken up by others, including some recent writers on qualitative research in the United States.

In contemporary French usage, bricolage means, broadly speaking, do it yourself, and a bricoleur is an amateur who can turn her or his hand to practical repairs of various kinds. Lévi-Strauss (1962/1966) used these concepts in his structuralist analysis of myths, portraying the production of myths as a form of bricolage. His usage was subsequently applied to new fields and elaborated on by others, including Gérard Genette (1966, p. 145); Jacques Derrida (1970/2007); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1972/2004, pp. 7–8); Deena Weinstein and Michael Weinstein (1991); and Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg (1992).

Lévi-Strauss was concerned with the contrast that is often drawn between “primitive” and “civilized” thought, but unlike some earlier views, he did not regard these as inferior and superior ways of thinking, respectively. Rather, he treated them as different modes of orientation toward the world, and he had a distinctive understanding of the value of primitive cultures (see Merquior, 1986, chap. 3).

For him, the character of the bricolage that produces myths is somewhere between that of science and that of modern art. The central feature of myth as bricolage is that there is a drive to produce a complete picture from whatever intellectual resources are currently available. This drive contrasts with the orientation of the scientist or engineer, who must accept that some things are not currently knowable or doable and who should insist on using only what are judged to be adequate intellectual resources. Furthermore, whereas bricolage focuses on surface features, on things as they appear, and seeks similarities and other relationships among these, science goes beyond surface appearances to find underlying generative structures.

Officially, at least, Lévi-Strauss did not see social science as a form of bricolage; he was explicitly wedded to a scientific version of research modeled on structural linguistics. However, a number of commentators have argued that qualitative research does, or should, follow this model (see Kincheloe, 2001; Kincheloe & Berry, 2004; Lincoln, 2001). In these terms, Norman Denzin andYvonna Lincoln (2005) portray qualitative research as involving the piecing together of diverse materials so as to produce an emergent construction that they describe as, “A complex, dense, reflexive collage-like creation that represents the researcher's images, understandings and interpretations of the world or phenomenon under analysis” (p. 6). In qualitative-inquiry-as-bricolage, materials are juxtaposed in open-ended ways designed to provoke readers rather than to convey some closed message. More generally, what is involved is a form of inquiry involving the flexible use of diverse theoretical and methodological resources in a manner that has more in common with art and literature than with natural science, but which claims its own form of rigor. Although the argument that qualitative researchers should become bricoleurs has been influential, it is not without its critics (see Hammersley, 1999).