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- Convenors:
-
Melissa Demian
(University of St Andrews)
Annastiina Kallius (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Location:
- Historicum, 3.92
- Sessions:
- Thursday 23 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
Short Abstract
This panel revisits Lévi-Strauss’ classic concept of bricolage to analyse the way that some current political forms draw upon elements of “left-over” or “waste” information to reassemble a sense of the real.
Long Abstract
In a world where all positions seem to have taken a binary form, we propose revisiting an older body of anthropological theory that offered tools for dismantling binary forms as often as it built them up. A frequently overlooked yet central element of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist thought conceptualised bricolage as a process of knowledge production analogous and complementary to both science and art. We are inspired by the recent re-translation of La Pensée sauvage (Wild Thought, 2021) to ask: can the idea of bricolage as an epistemic craft inform analyses of contemporary political and media phenomena? For Lévi-Strauss, bricolage operates within an already-available system of references, using any of these available elements to assemble meaning. It is a creative technique of knowledge-making, drawing on the “odds and ends” or waste products left over from other knowledge processes to construct and organise an assertion of the real. Ethnographic examples of bricolage include the ways people engage with conspiracy theories, propaganda campaigns, or activist initiatives as strategies for exerting agency over a world awash with the flotsam and jetsam of information. Bricolage can also manifest in unexpected political alliances that challenge traditional assumptions about who can collaborate to achieve shared goals. Lévi-Strauss’ claim that the systematic organisation of information is a universal knowledge practice is especially relevant in today’s polarised political climate. We invite papers that speak to the theme of bricolage as a craft for making sense of the present in ways that can both transcend polarisation and produce more of it.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Thursday 23 July, 2026, -Paper short abstract
This paper examines how artistic bricolage shapes the doing and undoing of mythistorical national narratives. Focusing on an artistic reworking of a Greek Junta-era propaganda reel, it explores how the medium’s recombinatory potential underlies both propaganda and acts of artistic sabotage.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how bricolage participates in the doing and undoing of mythistorical national narratives. Drawing on an example of contemporary artistic practice in Greece, I harken back to the ancillary figure of the bricoleur-as-artist. Through ethnographic and art-historical materials, I explore the work of Marina Gioti, who engages the materiality and mediality of a found Junta-era propaganda reel that bears a mythistorical narrative of national rebirth and political polarisation. Rather than attempting to overwrite the material, she plays with the reel’s recombinatory potential, sabotaging it and revealing its artifactuality. Lévi-Strauss held that bricolage underlies mythical thought, reversing diachrony and synchrony by playing with the order of structure and event. Yet he also acknowledged that bricolage is not pure open-ended play, but a mode of making constrained by available materials. Read through his account of thinking with “odds and ends,” the paper asks what kind of work flotsam lends itself to: what agency resides in residual materials, and what agency remains available to the artist as she navigates a medium burdened by historical overdetermination. In exploring these questions, the paper considers how history comes to feel real—and why some reels appear more real than others. Attending to moments when the “shitness” of history becomes apparent, the paper contributes to debates on the media and forms of history and the afterlives of political propaganda. I argue that bricolage and sabotage should be understood as twin strategies for dealing with the compromised materials of historical narratives.
Paper short abstract
In this paper I make use of Lévi-Strauss' concept of bricolage as a kaleidoscopic social technique to consider the constant recombination of old tropes in the activity of conspiracy theorising, as a means of exploring the creative or aesthetic capacity of this activity to captivate and persuade.
Paper long abstract
"This logic," suggested Lévi-Strauss of bricolage, "operates rather like a kaleidoscope: another instrument that contains odds and ends that serve to realise structural arrangements. The fragments come out of a process of breakage and destruction ... but with the requirement that its products present certain homologies among themselves" (2021: 42). I am inspired by the image of the kaleidoscope to consider the process of conspiracy theory as a form of aesthetic play through recycling old cultural elements and discursive tropes into something that appears both novel and dazzling.
I argue that the dazzling effect of the kaleidoscope is part of what lends conspiracy theorising as an activity its persuasive power, despite - or because of - the fact that there is often very little in conspiracy theory that is actually new. The tropes of child abduction and ritual cannibalism recur in the medieval blood libel, the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s, and the recent QAnon movement. The idea of fraudulent governments takes forms ranging from hidden histories to witches and aliens occupying high political offices. These homologous forms can be endlessly recombined to create the appearance of new stories that tap into anxieties about political, economic and spiritual power. It is this recombination of old elements into new stories that I describe not only as bricolage, but bricolage as a kaleidoscope whose dazzling effect lends conspiracy theory its power to attract and captivate adherents.
Paper short abstract
I read Afghan crossings into Europe as bricolage in Lévi-Strauss's structural sense: craft exercised with signs whose meanings administrative power fixed in advance. I argue that crossing is the management of one's own readability in the breakdowns of the apparatus, at unequal cost across bodies.
Paper long abstract
In this paper, I read the border-crossings of precarious Afghan travellers as a form of practical bricolage, recovering the structural sense Claude Lévi-Strauss gave the term against the resourcefulness register in migration scholarship. From Lévi-Strauss's perspective, the bricoleur works with a stock that is closed at the moment of the task, and its elements arrive pre-constrained by their prior uses. At the border, however, that pre-constraint has an author. The meanings sedimented in a passport or a fingerprint are laid down by administrative power rather than by diffuse prior use. For this reason, the engineer/bricoleur pair, untenable as a description of two intellects, returns here as a relation of positions. On one side stands a regime that performs transparent categories and purpose-built instruments; on the other, a crosser who must treat the performance as true while making do, by necessity rather than inclination, with whatever signs remain workable. Drawing on life-history interviews with Afghans whose trajectories ran from Iran into the European asylum system, I argue that bricolage at the border is the management of one's own readability at the points where the regime stops to read. The craft works in the gaps and breakdowns of the apparatus, and it takes its shape from the irreversible acts the system imposes. Crossings fail even when well assembled, and success have its own bodily and psychic costs, so my account resists celebration. The materials of readability, finally, are unequally distributed across bodies, and the body's visible surface is the hardest to rework.
Paper short abstract
In building on the concept of bricolage, in this paper I examine how the political right draws on art to build its own ontologies and utopias.
Paper long abstract
Since 2020, I have been following the public readings and workshops that take place at the Library of Conservatism in Berlin (BdK). Building on the private book collection of publicist Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing, the BdK opened in 2021 and has become a think tank and networking place for conservative and right-wing intellectuals.
In seeking to understand how the right draws on literature, and more broadly art, to publicize, relay, foster, and cement its convictions, I draw on ideas of bricolage, moral panic, and culture wars. With the new translation of Levi-Strauss’ Wild Thought, bricolage has become one conceptual tool through which to approach the various means through which ‘the right’ is made. By no means a political monolith, the right needs intellectual instruments and art to build its own utopias, ontologies, and even momentums. In centering in particular on two talks, one by Marc Jongen, party philosopher of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), and philosopher and literary analyst Kai Hammermeister, I examine how the right figures the relationship between politics and art.
What kinds of art and texts are being used, and how are they being used to cement political ideologies and foster connections? How do they idealize a mythical past, and how do they build on these myths for purposes of propaganda? Rather than posing bricolage as a mode of pure thought, I also pose it as a mode of labor that assists in forming a particular kinds of aesthetics, politics, and history.
Paper short abstract
When can amateur journalists be said to be practicing citizen media and when are they disseminating fake news? Drawing on ethnography of progressive and conservative protests in Brazil, I explore how protesters bricolage ‘truth’ from mass media fragments to assert competing visions of democracy.
Paper long abstract
In 2013, a series of progressive protests against police brutality broke out throughout Brazil. While mass media coverage was limited, the popular coverage of the protests was made by amateur journalists and celebrated as ‘citizen media.’ A decade later, in 2023, conservative protests against an alleged electoral fraud emerged. Mass media underplayed the demonstrations again, and protesters produced content that was quickly labelled ‘fake news.’ This paper asks: what epistemic practices unite these apparently opposed grassroots content creation initiatives?
Drawing on digital ethnography in Brasília and Rio de Janeiro around these two waves of protests, I analyse both movements as instances of bricolage, through which ordinary citizens use social media to creatively reassemble bits and pieces of information – including short videos, statistics, historical references and personal testimonies – to construct anti-mainstream assertions of what ‘democracy’ and ‘truth’ are. I argue that both fake news and citizen media draw on similar rhetorical resources: celebrations of free speech, empowerment of ordinary citizens as content producers and appeals to direct democracy over institutional accountability.
These cases epitomise how bricolage operates as an epistemic craft in polarised contexts. The same techniques that enable marginalised voices to challenge elite narratives also allow reactionary groups to undermine institutional knowledge. Rather than dismiss one as authentic and the other as deceptive, I examine how both engage in systematic organisation of available information to exert agency over political reality. The paper concludes by asking: what happens when competing bricoleurs work with overlapping materials to construct incommensurable truths?