RESPONSE to “The Science of the Concrete”: the bricoleur and the engineer

In Levi-Stauss’s model, the bricoleur is defined as “someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman”.  This is the loose French translation that Levi-Strauss (LS) uses to differentiate between modern, Western science (the engineer) and what LS explains as the traditional Neolithic, or early historical man’s science.  This early science is also employed by ‘primitive’ cultures which Western ethnographers of LS’s day chose as subjects. 

LS writes that an important difference exists between the engineer and the bricoleur.  The bricoleur, when looking for a specific tool or method for a certain project, looks to past uses of this tool and is limited by this history.  The engineer on the other hand has a limitless toolkit since he looks to the universe for methods and has more than his own history examine. LS explains that this is why there was “several thousand years of stagnation” between the Neolithic revolution and modern science.  He is basically saying that “primitive” groups have been using the same “toolkit” they have been using (here he groups “them” all into a large group with common descendants presumably) since the early domestication of plants/animals, metallurgy, and trad medicine. 

It is interesting to note that while LS uses certain phrases in this passage to equally qualify these two distinct modes of scientific thought - e.g. “These are certainly not a function of different stages of development” - overall his argument is laden with ethnocentrism. For example, portraying the early science used by “primitive“ people as stagnate, the cultures as stuck in their past or histories.  There are also undertones to his argument that bring back Derrida’s critique of LS in “The Violence of the Letter”, where the ethnocentrism expressed is not overt but buried in the presupposed logic that “primitive” societies possess greater integrity than modern Western cultures - in other words “the noble savage” perspective.     


CHRISTOPHER