Bric-a-Brac Article Response

In the beginning of this article Bric-a-Brac: The Everyday Work of Tom Friedman, talks about what bricolage and braconnage is. Jo Aplin argues that Friedman's process of making and making do, draws on the twin strategies of bricolage ("do-it-yourself") and braconnage ("poaching"), terms which turn poaching respectively from Claude Levi- Strauss. Farther on in the article,  Levi- Strauss's model of bricolage is a temporary, do-it-yourself form of collecting, reordering and recycling- a borrowing from other spheres and practices in order to generate if not something new than at least something else. And braconnage relies not on established modes of reading, in which readers passively absorb the text before them, but is rather a dynamic process in which the readers as braconneurs establish their own routes through the given material. Both bricolage and braconnage are tactical rather than strategic methods of making and thinking: that is they rely on a day-to-day form of piecing together and making sense of the world, not pre-planned, but made up as you go along.

Examples of bricolage are the following.

Tom Friedman- Gum wall mount 

Examples of Braconnage