Here's what I wrote on 11 May 1999
A chance to talk to a group of faculty about using the Web to teach, and specifically about my approach to electronic "commonplace books" inspired me to start thinking about possible tools that (so far as I know) don't exactly exist yet. I thought of a name that ought to have a product: Bricoleur, a utility that assists one in bricolage. Of course the Web has a lot to say about bricolage, mostly in French. Here are a few likely-looking links to start the exploration:
- Investing in the Bricoleur (Lee Thayer, Ph.D.)
- Writing Oneself in Cyberspace (Daniel Chandler)
- Constructing Knowledge from Interactions includes this quotation:
The bricoleur is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with 'whatever is at hand'.... In the continual reconstruction from the same materials, it is always earlier ends which are called upon to play the part of means.... The bricoleur may not ever complete his purpose but he always puts something of himself into it.... from Lévi-Strauss The Savage Mind, pp. 17, 21.- from a review of Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet:
The bricoleur is a term Turkle derives from Lévi-Strauss; it is a postmodern way of designing and working in which the thinker uses objects or simulated objects at hand to experiment with. It opposes the structured approach to progress which is more strategic and ordered. Turkle believes the simulations of the Mac and Windows operating systems draw computer users into the bricolage way of tackling new design projects and new ways of thinking about the world and society and their own identities. She also uses the work of Frederic Jameson to support her argument.Turkle extends her discussion of the bricoleur [Turkle :52] saying that simulation and "What if?" scenarios nurture informalist ways of knowing. People learn by interacting with simulated objects rather than through logic and calculation. Thus the computer operating system of the late 80s and 1990s suits and even perhaps controls another form of learning and knowing about the virtual world. The 1970s values of hard mastery no longer dominate the world of computers making this world accessible to those with other values.
Soft mastery, as Turkle terms bricolage, denotes a flexible, negotiated, non-hierarchical way of working. It is a style, she says, not a stage on the way to formal thinking and the imposition of will over the world.
7ii26
...and here some links collected yesterday:
Claude Levi Strauss' Concept of Bricolage NASRULLAH MAMBROL Literary Theory and Criticism (2016)...Bricolage is the skill of using whatever is at hand and recombining them to create something new. Levi-Strauss compares the working of the bricoleur and the engineer. The bricoleur, who is the "savage mind", works with his hands in devious ways, puts pre-existing things together in new ways, and makes do with whatever is at hand...The working of the bricoleur is parallel to the construction of mythological narratives. As opposed to the bricoleur, the engineer, who is the "scientific mind", is a true craftsman in that he deals with projects in entirety, taking into account the availability of materials, and creating new tools. Drawing a parallel, Levi-Strauss argues that mythology functions more like the bricoleur, whereas modern western science works more like an engineer. He suggests that the engineer creates a holistic totalising system, in which there are elements of permanence.
...A bricoleur doesn't care about the purity or stability or 'truth' of a system he or she uses, but rather uses what's there to get a particular job done.
...Bricolage doesn't worry about the coherence of the words or ideas it uses. For example, you are a bricoleur if you talk about penis envy or the Oedipus complex without knowing anything about psychoanalysis; you can use the terms without acknowledging the validity or 'truth' of the system that produced these ideas. Bricolage understands meaning not as something eternal and immutable, but as something provisional, something shifting.
...The idea of bricolage produces a new way to talk about, and think about, systems and structures without falling into the trap of trying to build a new stable system out of the ruins of a deconstructed one. It provides a way to think without establishing a new center, a privileged reference, an origin, a truth. It also inspires creativity and originality, making possible new ways of putting things together.
The virtuoso art of bricolage research Smadar Ben-Asher Frontiers in Psychology via NLM (2022)
Originally, the term "bricolage" referred to a variety of non-professional occupations carried out in an improvised and amateurish way. It has been used to describe a postmodernist technique of creatively recycling leftover items....In 1962, Lévi-Strauss presented his concept of "wild thinking" (Levi-Strauss, 1962), based on his travel diary, Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss, 1955) ...[he] related his experiences combining deep philosophical thought, prose, and anthropological investigation, all serving as a tool for describing the phenomena he observed. In his opinion, it is precisely the wild thinking, which is not based on ready-made patterns, that allowed him, as a researcher, to explain the world to himself and integrate into it.
...Both the engineer and the bricoleur live in a limited reality because every choice of tools and materials, whether facts or history, is personal and therefore not absolute or universal. Researchers using the bricolage methodology dare to take materials from their immediate environment, "whatever they can lay their hands on," even if these are vastly different, to assemble them and create a new innovative whole.
[he] ...described the bricolage methodology as a combination of the researchers' imagination with all the tools of knowledge at their disposal, using a rich repertoire of rituals, meaningful objects, observations, and social practices. To all these are added structured conversations and spontaneous interviews, institutional knowledge, and informal knowledge
...The research concept proposed by Lévi-Strauss found support in the work of Clifford James Geertz (1926-2006), one of the founders and leaders of symbolic anthropology. Geertz claimed that culture is transmitted in a system of concepts and symbolic forms that suit each society differently. Reality is full of symbols, therefore only a thick description of reality can lead to its understanding (Geertz, 1980). The wide range of interpretive practices that Geertz proposed is largely similar to the bricolage worldview described by Lévi-Strauss. Geertz called for a multi-directional scientific investigation that combines the methodologies of quantitative sciences with qualitative research. According to Geertz, there is no single absolute and correct reality, but different interpretations of reality must be explored through the construction of an experiential memory that will help describe and explain things with their many facets and all their complexity. Geertz (1994) claimed that the idea of many structures of personal and cultural reality is at the basis of the qualitative concept. The multiplicity of points of view demands a holistic approach, therefore it is not possible to expropriate individual variables from the overall context. To understand significant moments in a person's life, it is necessary to reconstruct one's personal experience and reflective understandings, and examine them in the context of cultural and historical texts and products or those conveyed by figurative structures of objects, buildings, monuments, or paintings. The starting point of qualitative research, to which the bricolage method belongs, is a naturalistic interpretive perspective, according to which the investigation is carried out within the natural world with as little intervention as possible.
...A bricolage approach requires a deep understanding that there is no one correct description of an event. The researcher's point of view shifts between the theoretical infrastructure and the observation of the phenomenon, the information that arises in the context of the researched topic, the data analysis, the researcher's point of view, the literary genre that is relevant to different parts of the research, and the language in which it is presented.
...We can conclude that the bricolage approach uses different methodologies that flexibly examine the complex dimensions of a studied phenomenon. The research process is characterized by observation from multiple perspectives that are sometimes competing with each other (Rogers, 2012). The bricolage approach combines in one study many methodological practices and empirical materials, different perspectives, and is best understood as a strategy that adds rigor, breadth, complexity, richness and depth to any investigation
...three key components: being satisfied with the materials found in the field given the limitations and constraints imposed by reality, utilizing the resources at hand, and combining resources for new purposes.
...The bricolage researcher must display a reflective position, honesty, and transparency. Moving between the individual and the collective, between the inside and the outside should be reflected in the honesty of the researcher. The researcher does not seek to adopt the neutral position of a remote documenter but is a participant, expressing a personal opinion.
...The limitations of methodological research have to do with the great skill required of the researcher, who must navigate with the aid of a roadmap but without marked paths. This demands creativity, navigation skills, reflective ability, and often patience and tolerance for getting lost or wasting time, in the belief that precisely the absence of a well-trodden path may lead to innovation.
...The bricolage methodology causes the authors to pay attention to the choice of steps they take, to report transparently on these steps and decisions made "correctly," and to accept the research as unique, a one-time effort under the given conditions. The researcher is similar to a chess player who chooses the appropriate piece in the unique conditions of the given game, using appropriate strategies to achieve the goal. Similar to the game of chess, although the rules are given, the movement of the pieces is always the result of a combination of analytical and creative thinking.
Bricoleur and Bricolage: From Metaphor to Universal Concept Christopher Johnson (2012)
Lévi-Strauss's concept of bricolage, first formulated in La Pensée sauvage (The Savage Mind) in 1962, was originally presented as an analogy for how mythical thought works, selecting the fragments or left-overs of previous cultural formations and re-deploying them in new combinations. Significantly, from its source in structural anthropology, the concept has travelled in two directions, towards both the sciences (molecular biology and evolutionary theory) and the humanities (art criticism and critical theory). The aim of this article is to return to Lévi-Strauss's original formulation of bricolage in order to explore the ways in which this technical metaphor transcends its status as simply a metaphor and becomes something like a universal concept. As the key opposition between the bricoleur and the engineer demonstrates, bricolage is also an ideological construct which carries with it a set of suppositions about the nature of science and technology in the post-war world. Looking at the wider scientific imaginary which informs this vision — in particular, Lévi-Strauss's representation of nuclear science — the article concludes by arguing for a more comprehensive understanding of the concept of bricolage as applicable not simply to traditional or residual forms of human activity, but also to the practice — and indeed the essence — of modern scientific and technological development.Bricolage: Natural Epistemology D.E. Tarkington Philosophy Now
...In fact, Levi-Strauss did not invent the term. It actually came from the French verb bricoler, which means 'to tinker' (to be distinguished from bricoleur, which is, 'someone who tinkers'). It seems to me that most creative endeavors involve some element of tinkering, as well as the chance and spontaneous aspects that Levi-Strauss also associated with bricolage. Therefore I would assert that even our most evolved and modern forms of engineering retain a residue of bricolage.It is in this more expansive spirit that I will attempt to show how bricolage is deeply embedded in our culture, via our brains, via the evolutionary process. I wish to show that no matter what models we may develop for what we can know and how we know it, bricolage has always been and will always be our default epistemology. That is to say, putting together what we randomly find has always been our primary way of gaining knowledge.
Bricolage: potential as a conceptual tool for understanding access to welfare in superdiverse neighbourhoods Jenny Phillimore et al. (2016)
...Rapport and Overing (2014) talk of bricolage as the putting together of multiple cultural forms to innovate and create something new or more fit for purpose. Bricolage is frequently viewed as being associated with originality and innovation, and the act of bricolage as embodying individual agency and consciousness, while the socially and politically structured dimensions of bricolage are less investigated....The Routledge Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology provides the following definition:
bricolage, bricoleur A bricoleur is a kind of French handyman, who improvizes technical solutions to all manner of minor repairs. In The Savage Mind (1962) Lévi-Strauss used this image to illustrate the way in which societies combine and recombine different symbols and cultural elements in order to come up with recurring structures. Subsequently bricolage has become a familiar term to describe various processes of structured improvization....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 possess 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.
...In education and the discussion of constructionism, Seymour Papert discusses two styles of solving problems. He describes bricolage as a way to learn and solve problems by trying, testing, and playing around.
Claude Lévi-Strauss on Bricolage Dictionary of Arguments
In philosophy, bricolage refers to a mode of problem-solving or creation using available materials or concepts, often involving improvisation and adaptability rather than a predefined plan. The concept was introduced by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in his work "The Savage Mind," published in 1962....uses materials that are out of line with those used by the specialist. The peculiarity of mythical thinking now consists in expressing oneself with the help of means whose composition is strange and which, although they are comprehensive, remain limited. Nevertheless, it must make use of them, whatever the problem is, because it has nothing else at hand. It thus appears to be a kind of intellectual craft
...The rule of the game is to get along with what is at hand (for the craftsman) at all times, i. e. with a limited selection of tools and materials, which are also heterogeneous. The means of the craftsman are not determinable as in view of a project