Bricoleur and Bricolage: From Metaphor to Universal Concept

Levi-Strauss's concept of bricolage, first formulated in La Pensee 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 Levi-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 im...