%# http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2001/04/26.html % $m->comp(".t_top", caption => "About the Name");
The name Bricolage
was not drawn directly from the common usage
of the term in French, but rather from the first chapter of The Savage
Mind,
by the famed French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. In
that famous discussion of scientific thought vs. mythical thought--of
science vs. the science of the concrete
--Lévi-Strauss
declares, Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual
bricolage.
Bricolage is the product of a bricoleur, a kind of handyman who assembles
the fruits of his labors from the tools he has at hand. Similarly, mythical
thought uses the extant concepts available to the cultural bricoleur to shape
the world of cultural understanding. In other words, one's understanding and
interpretation of the world and its events derives from assembling new
interpretations based on existing cultural (Lévi-Strauss would say
structural
) symbols. Signs allow and even require the
interposing and incorporation of a certain amount of human culture into
reality,
Lévi-Strauss writes. Thus signs (or symbols, as modern
anthropologists are more likely to call them) are the building blocks of
cultural comprehension.
Similarly, content is assembled in the Bricolage content management system
by drawing on extant elements to create a new end product. Element
administrators function as Lévi-Straussian scientists,
in
that they create new symbols (elements) that document editors—as new
media bricoleurs—draw upon to assemble and manage new structures of
meaning (content).
For those who may find this explanation too much a stretch, we fall back on
the meaning of the term bricolage
as it is commonly used in English,
rather than French. For our French users, who might see the name and
immediately think big hack,
note that typical English definition,
according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language,
Fourth Edition, is simply, something made or put together using
whatever materials happen to be available.
This definition nicely
describes how Bricolage documents are built from the elements defined for
them.
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