‘Bricolage’: reclaiming a conceptual tool

Abstract

This article provides the genealogy of bricolage and underscores the modifications it has undergone within the sociologies of culture and religion. It draws on the study of three new religious movements that teach unconventional versions of Hinduism and kabbalah, to show that the current understanding of bricolage in the studies of popular culture and religion over-estimates its eclectic and personal nature and neglects its sociocultural logics. It tends to take for granted the availability of cultural resources used in bricolage, and finally it fails to understand the social significance of individualism, overlooking the ways in which norms and power could be expressed through culture in the contemporary world. This article suggests that it would be best reclaiming bricolage's original meaning, prompting questions about the contexts that make certain elements available, social patterns that may organise bricolage, who ‘bricole’, what for, who is empowered, from what and by using whose tradition.

Keywords::

• bricolage
• cultural resistance
• religion
• class
• subculture

Acknowledgement

This article draws on research supported by the British Economic and Social Research Council (RES-063-27-0041).

Disclosure statement

The author has no financial interest or benefit arising from the direct applications of their research.

Notes

^1. It is not possible, nor perhaps desirable to make an exhaustive review of all the publications referring in passing to bricolage: the article therefore discusses those that are most influential and illustrative. It is also beyond the scope of this article, focused on one concept, to address symbolic creativity as a whole, although some arguments specifically made here on bricolage apply to this broader issue.

^2. Unfortunately translated as ‘handymen’ in the English version.

^3. Many authors equate ‘bricolage’ with ‘pastiche’, revealing a lack of reflection of the actual meaning of these notions. While one may entail the combinations of diverse cultural styles, the other one designates the imitation of a particular style.

^4. Except when it is applied to the making of queer identities and subcultures which challenge mainstream culture's heteronormativity (Taylor 2012, 131).

^5. The research's methods and findings are fully developed in Altglas (2014).

^6. A pejorative term first used by Native Americans, referring to those trying to pass as traditional Native American healers.