Abstract
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Belgian-born French anthropologist, published La Pensée Sauvage in 1962, followed by its English translation The Savage Mind in 1966. A central claim of the book is that all human minds organize knowledge through universal structures, a premise that gave rise to structuralism as a method for analyzing human cognition and culture. As part of this line of thought, the book challenges the notion that tribal communities think less sophisticatedly than modern societies. Lévi-Strauss argues that Indigenous peoples develop an intimate understanding of the material world and a distinct way of reorganizing both reality and their perception of it, what he calls bricolage.
The chapter on bricolage is particularly renowned. Described as “the science of the concrete” (p. 13–16), bricolage explores the tangible, material world we inhabit. This explorative way of investigating our surroundings is often contrasted with a structured and logical mode, associated with the modern science of the Western world. Lévi-Strauss presents a compelling discussion on the significance of both approaches, challenging the colonialist assumption that modern science is superior to mythical thought, the latter being a term he often uses to refer to bricolage. He considers both to be equally valid modes of scientific investigation, each employing its own distinct methods of inquiry. Bricolage combines perception, imagination, and “sensory intuition,” qualities often lacking in the methods of modern science, which he also refers to as engineering, a mode grounded in rational ordering (p. 15). However, Lévi-Strauss proposes that both ways are driven by the same fundamental desire to systematize the world and uncover its underlying order, finding the distinction between them less discernible than it may appear.
The volume’s influence extended beyond anthropology to sociology, cultural studies, and literary theory. Bricolage has been valued across disciplines, including organization studies, for illustrating how organizations creatively adapt structures, processes, and resources to navigate complexity, foster innovation, and respond to changing environments. Discussions in Organization and affiliated journals focus on bricolage as an ethnographic method that generates situated knowledge at the borders of different cultures (Linstead and Grafton-Small, 1992; Yousfi, 2021), or as a set of practices for working around authority-established restrictions, resulting in the reframing of meaning (Alcadipani and Islam, 2017). Authors have also shown that local actors incorporate bricolage tactics into seemingly rational decision-making processes (Cabantous et al., 2010), co-creating institutional change both individually and collectively (Duymedjian and Rüling, 2010; Staggs et al., 2022). A renewed engagement with Lévi-Strauss’s classic could reinvigorate the dialog and deepen our understanding of contemporary organizational and societal challenges, marked by increasingly visible divisions and the declining effectiveness of rational, pre-planned approaches in a world of growing uncertainty (Bechky and Okhuysen, 2011; Carstensen et al., 2023).
In Wild Thought (2021), Jeffrey Mehlman and John Harold Leavitt offer this renewed engagement through a fresh translation of Lévi-Strauss’s masterpiece. The most striking change was the much-needed revision of the old title, The Savage Mind. The book’s prospectus, written by Lévi-Strauss and omitted from previous editions, notes that “wild thought” is “not the thought of wild men” (p. 11). This clarifies that Lévi-Strauss’s study is intended to go beyond an anthropological analysis of traditional communities. The old title echoed 19th-century social evolutionism, which ranked human development from savagery to barbarism to civilization.
Lévi-Strauss explicitly challenged this view, stating that bricolage and engineering, or modern science, are “two distinct modes of scientific thought, each of them a function not of unequal stages of the development of the human mind, but of two strategic levels at which nature allows itself to be grasped by scientific knowledge” (p. 21). Lévi-Strauss includes many examples from anthropological research to demonstrate how advancements in civilizations, such as pottery, weaving, agriculture, and the domestication of animals, could not have developed without bricolage. The science grounded in continuous experimentation and “intimate familiarity” with the concrete world can transform “a weed into a cultivated plant” or “unstable clay . . . into a solid, watertight piece of pottery,” but not by accident alone (p. 13–15). It requires a methodical approach: “centuries of active and methodical observation, bold and controlled hypotheses rejected or confirmed by means of tirelessly repeated experiments,” supported by a “passionate attention” toward the surrounding world (p. 14).
The new translation Wild Thought reflects the book’s critique of modern science for underappreciating the significance of how local communities connect with nature, as well as how people think through embodied, sensory interaction with the material world. It accurately captures the intentional ambiguity in the phrase la pensée sauvage, which can be translated not only as “wild thought” but also as “undomesticated,” “out-of-the-forest,” or “wild pansy,” a plant that has not yet been domesticated, beautiful in its raw appearance (p. 9). Thus, the title of the book alludes to the ways we think and relate to nature, as well as encompassing the idea we ourselves are nature attempting to understand itself.
The new edition’s main achievement is its improved, well-referenced descriptions of local tribes, which mostly restore the richness of Lévi-Strauss’s language. There are moments when the text appears almost completely new, doing justice to some misunderstood parts of the original work. However, there are also passages that do not benefit much from being translated with great fidelity. At times, enhanced precision results in a loss of ambiguity that was crucial to the volume’s metaphorical overtones. This is especially evident in the second part of the crucial chapter on bricolage, where Lévi-Strauss engages in a nuanced exploration of the differences between bricolage, engineering, art, and the craftsman. In the sentence, “the bricoleur remains someone who works with his hands, using means that are skewed in comparison with those of the professional craftsman” (p. 16), the metaphorical ambiguity in describing the bricoleur’s tactics as “devious means” (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 16–17) is lost. Lévi-Strauss’s earlier reference to the Old French bricoleur, meaning a ball that rebounds off course, was meant to highlight a key trait of bricoleurs: adaptive and indirect rather than planned practices, that work around obstacles, an idea later described as “zig-zagging behavior” (Ciborra, 2004: 24).
Further, in the new translation, many explanations appear more complicated than before. A detailed comparison reveals that changes to one or two words make whole paragraphs more challenging to understand than the original. This may stem from phrasing that invites misinterpretation or the introduction of terms that add complexity. For instance, “mental act” (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 20) is replaced with “consciousness” (p. 16) when describing how thought forms.
Furthermore, some paragraphs are filled with nominalizations, which turn what were previously descriptions of a process into scientific language that lacks flow. There are also cases where word choices unintentionally intensify metaphors, adding new tones to the text, for example, translating “assail nature from a different angle” (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 16) as “attack nature from a different angle,” or using the term “prisoner” (p. 15) to describe “mythical thought which is imprisoned in events” (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 16). What once felt poetic and more open to interpretation now appear direct and stilted.
In the introduction to Wild Thought, the translators note that it is “a demanding book to read, and a nightmare to translate” (p. 9). They support this statement with evidence from their detailed research, enhancing our understanding of the context in which the book was written. While sympathetic to the translators’ statement, which many would probably agree with, there remains a sense of unfulfilled desire that more could have been done in addressing the sexist and ethnocentric language. The argument that “the book was first published in 1962, so it should read like a book from 1962” (p. 9), does not seem convincing enough, especially when it comes to something that could potentially be a relatively easy fix, by replacing words like men with people, he with she or they, and the colonial term Eskimo, with Inuit. Instead, it leaves us craving more, particularly after such a promising major change as a rewrite of the old title.
Considering these challenges, it’s difficult to be purely enthusiastic about the new translation as it requires critical reflection. Though Lévi-Strauss was often criticized for the way he presents his concepts, offering numerous descriptions, filled with unfinished digressions, it seems he intended for readers to move beyond the surface of his words and actively speculate on the meaning of these notions. By the end of studying his work, through the abundance of ideas, the reader somehow arrives at a working understanding of what these elements are. However, this interpretive richness does not always transfer smoothly in the new translation, which, despite its clarity and structure, occasionally limits the ambiguity that was central to the original experience of the text. It seems that with the precision, some of the magic has been lost. Nevertheless, it was Lévi-Strauss who taught his audience that the experience of the world is only speculative, and that continuous interaction is more vital than the precise specification of any project. Thanks to the new translation, we are once again able to engage in ongoing dialog with the author. Hopefully, this new edition will spark conversations that extend beyond the text and stay with readers long after the final page.
