Sunday Word: Bricolage

[sallymn]

bricolage [bree-kuh-lahzh, brik-uh-]

noun:
1 a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety of available things.
2 (in literature) a piece created from diverse resources.
3 (in art) a piece of makeshift handiwork.
4 the use of multiple, diverse research methods.

Examples:

Billed as fiction, this creative-critical work is a bricolage of archival research, colonial histories, transcribed conversations, ghost stories, memoir, epistolary address, reimagined pasts, speculative and suspended futures. (Jenny Hedley, A technology to remember and forget: André Dao’s Anam, Overland, August 2023)

That resourcefulness has developed into an art of exhilarating bricolage, of functioning objects that are greater than the sum of their pieced-together parts. (Andrew Russeth, Tom Sachs: Rocket Man to Renaissance Man, New York Times, July 2022)

This distinction also escapes a number of creative writing researchers who have adapted bricolage as a research methodology. They enumerate the benefits without sufficiently acknowledging the drawbacks, which include superficiality, overgeneralisation and misinterpretation of the theories and practices of other disciplines. (Jeri Kroll, 'The writer as interlocutor: The benefits and drawbacks of bricolage in creative writing research', Journal of writing and writing courses, 2021)

Her bricolage approach to songwriting is fairly obviously that of someone raised with streaming’s decontextualised smorgasbord as their primary source of music. You can hear it in the way she leaps from one source to another, unburdened by considerations of genre or longstanding notions of cool, like someone compiling a personal playlist. (Alexis Petridis, PinkPantheress: Fancy That review – sharp-minded bops hop across pop’s past and present, The Guardian, May 2025)

The system eventually introduced for Big Bang reflected this fragility and contingency of infrastructures: it was the creative result of reshaping legacy devices into a system that did the job for the time being. A band-aid. A product of creative, recombinant bricolage. (Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets)

Origin:
term used in arts and literature, 'work made from available things,' by 1966, via Lévi-Strauss, from French bricolage, from bricoler 'to fiddle, tinker' and, by extension, 'make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are to hand (regardless of their original purpose),' 16c, from bricole (14c) (Online Etymology Dictionary)

According to French social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the artist 'shapes the beautiful and useful out of the dump heap of human life.' Lévi-Strauss compared this artistic process to the work of a handyman who solves technical or mechanical problems with whatever materials are available. He referred to that process of making do as bricolage, a term derived from the French verb bricoler (meaning 'to putter about') and related to bricoleur, the French name for a jack-of-all-trades. Bricolage made its way from French to English during the 1960s, and it is now used for everything from the creative uses of leftovers ('culinary bricolage') to the cobbling together of disparate computer parts ('technical bricolage'). (Merriam-Webster)