The Myth-Maker's Toolkit: Understanding Lévi-Strauss's Concept of Bricolage in Structural Anthropology
Bricolage is a foundational concept in Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology, used to describe a specific mode of thought he attributed to non-industrial societies, which he termed 'the savage mind.' It refers to a process of creation, akin to tinkering or DIY, where new structures of meaning are built by imaginatively rearranging a finite set of pre-existing cultural elements. Lévi-Strauss famously contrasted the 'bricoleur' with the 'engineer.' The engineer represents modern scientific thought, starting with a goal and creating specific tools and materials to achieve it. The bricoleur, by contrast, starts with a limited, heterogeneous 'toolkit' of available signs and symbols and creates new combinations from this pre-constrained set. This concept was most powerfully applied to the analysis of myth. For Lévi-Strauss, myths are not arbitrary stories but logical constructions produced through bricolage. The myth-maker reassembles fragments of older narratives, cultural symbols, and binary oppositions (like nature/culture or raw/cooked) to create a new story that mediates a fundamental social or philosophical contradiction. The significance of bricolage was its radical re-evaluation of non-Western thought, arguing that it was not inferior or 'pre-logical' but a parallel 'science of the concrete' that is equally complex and systematic. It reveals a universal human cognitive structure, a shared drive to create order and meaning from the world around us.
Introduction: The Logic of the 'Savage Mind'
In his seminal 1962 work, The Savage Mind (La Pensée Sauvage), French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced the concept of bricolage to revolutionize the Western understanding of non-industrial, non-literate societies. At the time, prevailing thought often characterized the thinking of these societies as 'primitive,' 'pre-logical,' or 'childlike.' Lévi-Strauss vehemently disagreed. He argued that their thought was not less logical, but differently logical. Bricolage is the term he used to describe this distinct mode of intellectual operation—a 'science of the concrete' that is just as complex and systematic as Western scientific thought.
The word 'bricolage' comes from the French verb bricoler, which means to tinker, to create things using whatever materials are at hand, much like a DIY handyman. Lévi-Strauss co-opted this term to describe a process of thought that creates new structures of meaning by rearranging a finite, pre-existing set of cultural elements.
The Core Dichotomy: The Bricoleur vs. The Engineer
To clarify the nature of bricolage, Lévi-Strauss created a powerful binary opposition between two ideal types of creators: the Bricoleur and the Engineer. This is not a judgment of one being superior to the other, but a way to highlight two different approaches to problem-solving and creation.
- The Bricoleur (Represents Mythical Thought):
Materials: Works with a finite, heterogeneous, and pre-constrained set of tools and materials—the 'treasure' or 'toolkit' of cultural signs, symbols, and narratives that already exist. Process: The bricoleur's process begins with the materials. They 'converse' with their available elements to see what can be constructed from them. The structure is an outcome of the possibilities inherent in the toolkit. Goal: To create a new arrangement or combination from old parts. The goal is to reconfigure the existing world to make sense of it, often by creating analogies and mediating contradictions. Example: A myth-maker who takes characters from an old story, symbols from a ritual, and a known social opposition (e.g., raw vs. cooked) and weaves them into a new myth to explain a recent event.
- The Engineer (Represents Modern Scientific Thought):
Materials: Works with a specific project or problem in mind. If the right tools or materials don't exist, the engineer designs and creates them from first principles. Process: The engineer's process begins with the goal or concept. The structure is pre-defined, and the materials are subordinated to the project's demands. The universe of tools is open and expandable. Goal: To create something entirely new that transcends the constraints of the existing world. The goal is to produce a new object or solution based on abstract principles. Example: An aerospace engineer who, needing a material with specific heat resistance for a rocket, develops a new metal alloy in a laboratory.
Lévi-Strauss argues that the 'savage mind' operates as a bricoleur. It doesn't invent new elements from scratch but cleverly and systematically rearranges the cultural inventory at its disposal to build coherent intellectual structures.
Bricolage in Action: Myth as the Prime Example
Myth is the quintessential product of bricolage. For Lévi-Strauss, a myth is not a fanciful, arbitrary story. It is a logical instrument for resolving fundamental, often unconscious, contradictions within a society's worldview.
A myth-maker is a bricoleur who rummages through the 'debris' of past social events and cultural narratives. This 'debris' includes:
- Mythemes: The smallest constituent units of a myth (e.g., 'a hero slays a monster,' 'a forbidden act is committed').
- Binary Oppositions: Fundamental cultural contrasts like Nature/Culture, Raw/Cooked, Life/Death, Male/Female, High/Low.
- Symbols and Characters: Pre-existing figures and objects with established symbolic weight.
The myth-maker takes these fragments and reassembles them into a new narrative structure. The meaning of the new myth does not lie in its individual elements but in the new relationships and combinations forged between them. The myth functions to mediate a contradiction that is too difficult to resolve directly. For example, Lévi-Strauss famously analyzed the Oedipus myth as a bricolage structure that attempts to mediate the contradiction between the belief that humans are born from the earth (autochthony) and the empirical knowledge that they are born from the union of two parents.
Other Examples of Bricolage
- Totemism: Lévi-Strauss reinterpreted totemism not as a primitive form of religion, but as a classificatory system—a form of bricolage. Societies do not choose totemic animals (e.g., Bear Clan, Eagle Clan) because they worship them, but because the perceived differences between animal species provide a ready-made, 'concrete' model for thinking about the differences between social groups. The natural world becomes a toolkit of signs used to structure and understand the social world.
- Modern Bricolage: The concept has been widely adopted outside of anthropology. A DJ who mixes and samples pre-existing songs to create a new track is a bricoleur. A subculture like punk, which takes everyday objects like safety pins and garbage bags and re-purposes them as fashion, is performing an act of bricolage to create a new social identity and statement.
Significance in Structural Anthropology
The concept of bricolage is central to Lévi-Strauss's structuralist project. It demonstrates that all human minds, regardless of their technological or social context, have an innate drive to create order and meaning. The 'savage mind' is not a relic of an earlier evolutionary stage but a parallel mode of thought, equally valid and complex as the 'domesticated' scientific mind. By showing how myths are logically constructed, bricolage validates non-Western intellectual traditions and reveals the universal, underlying structures of human cognition.
Key points
- Bricolage is a mode of thought that creates new meaningful structures by recombining a finite set of pre-existing elements.
- Lévi-Strauss contrasts the 'bricoleur' (mythical thought) with the 'engineer' (scientific thought) to highlight two different logical processes.
- The bricoleur works with what is 'at hand,' while the engineer designs new tools and materials for a specific project.
- Bricolage is described as a 'science of the concrete,' a logic based on analogy, metaphor, and the recombination of tangible signs.
- Myth is the quintessential example of bricolage, where old narrative fragments are reassembled to mediate cultural contradictions.
- The meaning of a 'bricolaged' structure (like a myth) is found in the new relationships between its re-arranged parts, not in the parts themselves.
- Totemism is another example, using the natural world as a 'toolkit' to classify and structure the social world.
- The concept was revolutionary because it argued that 'primitive' thought is not pre-logical but operates with a different, yet equally complex, logic.
- Bricolage reveals the universal human need to impose order and meaning on the world, a core tenet of Lévi-Strauss's structuralism.