From the French-language verb bricoler, meaning "to tinker" or "to fiddle." A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur, a person who creates things from scratch, is creative and resourceful; a person who collects information and things and then puts them together in a way that they were not originally designed to do.
French term meaning "puttering around" or "doing odd jobs." Claude Lévi-Strauss (see structuralism) gave the term a more precise anthropological sense in books like The Savage Mind (1966) by stipulating that it refer to, among other things, a kind of shamanic spontaneous creativity (see shaman) accompanied by a willingness to make do with whatever is at hand, rather than fuss over technical expertise. The ostensible purpose of this activity is to make sense of the world in a non-scientific, non-abstract mode of knowledge by designing analogies between the social formation and the order of nature. As such, the term embraces any number of things, from what was once called anti-art to the punk movement's reinvention of utlitarian objects as fashion vocabulary (see, for example, Dick Hebdige's Subculture [1979]). See also bricoleur.