Bricolage
Construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, as opposed to strictly purpose-fabricated and planned.
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Origin
Claude Lévi-Strauss borrowed the everyday French word for an odd-job handyman's improvisation in his 1962 work The Savage Mind (La Pensée sauvage), using it to describe how mythological thought recombines available cultural fragments rather than engineering from scratch. Jacques Derrida extended the term in a landmark 1966 lecture, arguing all philosophical discourse is necessarily bricolage. Evolutionary biologist François Jacob later applied the metaphor to evolution itself in 1977.
Updated February 22, 2026