Index Academic Sites Active audience Advertising Althusser, Louis Barthes, Roland Baudrillard, Jean Bricolage Colour Companies Culture Jamming Eco, Umberto Faces Lacan, Jacques Levi-Strauss, Claude Leymore, Varda Magic Metaphor & Metonymy Myth Narrative Peirce, Charles Saunders Saussure, Ferdinand de Structuralism Totemism Trains Visual Semiotics Williamson, Judith Women

Bricolage

This refers to a type of logic referred to by Claude Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind (1962) and in Totemism (1962). Levi-Strauss derived the meaning of bricolage from the "bricoleur" -- someone who does odd jobs, making and mending things from bits and pieces which have been left over from previous jobs. It provides a "science of the concrete" by which the world is ordered in minute ways. Judith Williamson says that advertisers employ bricolage as they can only construct meanings for products out of the bits and pieces of ideological thought that already exist.