The science of concrete/ week 4

In the first chapter Levi Strauss established two types of gaining knowledge. One is the “science of concrete” or mythical though and the other the scientific investigation.

The Mythical though “and exploration of the sensible world in sensible terms. This science of the concrete was necessarily restricted by its essence to results other than those destined to be achieved by the exact natural science” (p16) Scientific though in the other hand have an answer for what we can’t see. To explain this definitions Levi Strauss draw an analogy. Can you explain what he means by ‘bricoleur’, ‘bricolage’? And how this concept is related to these ways of acquiring knowledge.

Does Levi Strauss put any of theses approaches over the other one?

Levi-Strauss argued that artist “is both something of a scientist and of a ‘bricoleur’” structure and event. He based this argument on "to understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its parts" (p 23) What is he saying here? Is he triying to say than an artist is something in between an ethnographer and a scientist, a translator of the world? “reduction in scale reverses the situation. Being smaller, the object as a whole seems less formidable. By being quantitatively diminished, it seems to us qualitatively simplified.” Is he saying that this way is easier to grasp concepts, that the artist is in between worlds, theory and practice, myth and science. Do you agree with him?