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- Convenors:
-
Melissa Demian
(University of St Andrews)
Annastiina Kallius (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies)
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- Formats:
- Panel
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 1Paper short abstract
Through an auto ethnography of my experience with the state, I trace documents, discourse, actors of the district administration up to refusal to work with the Dongria Kondh community in India and argue paradox and play to be central in state practices and of being constitutive of its power.
Paper long abstract
Through an auto ethnography of my encounter with the state in southern Odisha to work with Dongria Kondh ‘tribal’, Adivasi group in India who are having protracted battle with the state and mining giant Vedanta, I trace through assemblages of documents, discourse, actors at various level of the district administration through the point when I am refused access to work with the community and posit it to be a bricoleur. Through such tracing, I highlight a comedy of errors, confusion between departments, rebellion from within, to illustrate the state as paradoxical and playful as opposed to a Weberian rational bureaucratic entity that is unified and purposive. I demonstrate how ‘infinite play’ is central to such a bricolage where existing discourses around indigeneity, the savageness of tribals, are mobilized along with tropes of preservation of culture, mingling with mixtures of executive orders and relying on wait times, and spaces of ambiguity. In the end, I show how ‘whatever works’, ‘this or that’, finally ends with a completely different note that lands in my mailbox, refusing access to the community. Further, juxtaposing this with how the community itself perceived me, I highlight the rather paradoxical nature of the state in reifying relations and marking a clear divide through the tribal ‘other’ while attempting to mainstream the peoples, and argue that such imposed and argued isolationism is used non-uniformly and is paradoxical, but that both such paradox and play is constitutive of the state and its power
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
This paper examines everyday survival among Afghan refugees as a form of practical bricolage, showing how people assemble housing, work, and documents from the fragmented resources of asylum regimes.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines everyday survival among Afghan refugees as a form of practical bricolage, drawing on Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of bricolage as a craft that assembles workable arrangements from limited and heterogeneous materials rather than from coherent plans or stable resources (Lévi-Strauss [1962] 2021). Based on ethnographic research with Afghan refugees living under legal precarity in European and transit contexts, the paper focuses on how people construct livable, if temporary, futures by recombining fragmented elements of asylum regimes, informal and semi-formal labor, humanitarian assistance, family obligations, and transnational support networks.
Rather than approaching these practices through resilience or adaptation frameworks, the paper asks how refugees identify, evaluate, and repurpose the “odds and ends” of asylum systems such as expired or temporary documents, partial recognition of skills, short-term housing arrangements, and intermittent NGO support into usable configurations of everyday life, how these material assemblages shape refugees’ temporal horizons, balancing immediate survival with uncertain long-term possibilities, and how survival depends on constant recalibration rather than linear progress.
The paper argues that everyday survival operates as a form of practical bricolage that neither overcomes nor escapes structural uncertainty but renders it temporarily inhabitable. By foregrounding bricolage as a mode of future-making under constraint, the paper contributes a fine-grained account of how Afghan refugees craft livable lives in the absence of coherent trajectories of return, integration, or mobility (Hage 2009).
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?