The Curious Bricoleur

Recently, in a session of my Qualitative Research Methods class, the instructor asked that each of us come up with a metaphor for our particular notion of a 'researcher.' STRUGGLE STRUGGLE STRUGGLE. You could read it on the faces of everyone in the room . . . you could smell the smoking oil and hear the grinding gears:

A METAPHOR?!? For a 'researcher'?!?!

But we did have some minutes to think about it. Thankfully . . .

This exercise was no where near as easy as the impromptu assignment given in a 'Think Outside the Box' seminar I attended. There, all I had to do was come up with a cartoon or comic character with which I identified; there was, though, a caveat: I also had to come up with three reasons why. The answer, at that time, came to me in a flash: Yosemite Sam . . . and the reasons? Well . . .

1. He sort of looks like me (or, I sort of look like him)
2. We are both constantly thwarted by inanimate objects (my favorite enemy being paper towel dispensers)
3. We are both all bluster and no substance

I don't know why--particularly given my work on simile and metaphor (or maybe because of it)--but I found this exercise particularly difficult . . . until, that is, I started to think outside of the box.

A day or two before, Laurie and I had watched a PBS program about Brunelleschi's Dome in the Florence Cathedral. It was (and still is) an engineering marvel, in terms of its size, the techniques by which it was constructed, and the development of special construction tools to raise and lower materials to the work site, 200+ feet above the ground.

But, it was the bricklaying technique that caught my imagination: a self-reinforcing herringbone that interrupted the shear planes and transmitted and shared the structural load. Courses of brick were aligned using 'lines' that passed through one another as they ran from a flower pattern to the exterior face of the dome. In the program, modern bricklayers were (re)learning Brunelleschi's construction techniques by building a smaller, replica dome. Brunelleschi was neither a trained architect nor engineer; he was a master goldsmith. Yet, he became one of the foremost engineers and architects of the Renaissance. And, the dome of the Florence Cathedral is, arguably, his masterpiece.

So . . . getting back to the metaphor. Thinking outside of the box, I reasoned that researchers are curious about the hows, the whys, the wherefores of phenomena; otherwise, why would they pursue learning about those things? And, the results of their research work are built in layers that are interconnected in ways not unlike the courses of brickwork in Brunelleschi's dome. In fact, some theories of qualitative research refer to the process and the researcher in terms of the postmodern notions of bricolage and bricoleurs; for example, while 'writing' this post, I just stumbled upon this looking for some links that might help my notions make more sense. 

Apparently, Claude Lévi-Strauss is credited with coining the term bricoleur. You can find his explanation of the term in The Savage Mind (1962, translated to English in 1966). The book is still in print and, in my opinion, is a good read as well as a good example qualitative research.

And my metaphor? How did it go over? It was well accepted and, apparently, I was not the only one thinking in this way. A fellow student also thought in terms of 'construction' but in relation to Leggos. In both metaphors, the notion of interlocking 'brickwork' played a crucial role.