Bricolage –
from the French-language verb bricoler, meaning "to tinker" or "to fiddle" –
is that language's equivalent of the English phrase "do-it-yourself".
In art, bricolage is a technique where works are constructed from various materials available or on hand, and is seen as a characteristic of postmodern works.
These materials may be mass-produced or "junk". See also: Merz, polystylism, collage.
In biology the biologist François Jacob uses the term bricolage to describe the apparently cobbled-together character of much biological structure, and views it as a consequence of the evolutionary history of the organism. (Molino 2000, p.169)
In cultural studies bricolage is used to mean the processes by which people acquire objects from across social divisions to create new cultural identities. In particular, it is a feature of subcultures such as the punk movement. Here, objects that posess one meaning (or no meaning) in the dominant culture are acquired and given a new, often subversive meaning. For example, the safety pin became a form of decoration in punk culture.
Bricolage is also often contrasted to engineering: building by trial and error rather than based on theory.
A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur. A bricoleur is a person who creates things from scratch, is creative and resourceful: a person who collects information and things and then puts them together in a way that they were not originally designed to do.
The book Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices by Chris Locke
uses the term "bricoleur" and "bricolage", describing them in the following terms:
In 1962, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote a book called The Savage Mind, in which he says "Language is a form of human reason and has its reasons which are unknown to man." Man, I don't even know why I quoted that, except that it sounds pretty cool.[4] More to the point, he talks about a concept for which English has no equivalent: bricolage.[5] In essence, bricolage is what tinkers do – collecting odd bits of stuff they think may be potentially useful, then using whatever bits seem to work in the context of some later repair job. Simple. And yet profound. Because the bits the bricoleur ends up using were not designed for the use they end up being put to. Figuring out which bits to collect and how to apply them to some task at hand requires a completely different kind of thinking than the procedural algorithmic thought processes business has become so dependent upon.
Note: pace the text of the quote, Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels, Belgium.
Reference
- Molino, Jean (2000). "Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Music and Language", The Origins of Music. Cambridge, Mass: A Bradford Book, The MIT Press. ISBN 0262232065.
