Page - 67 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/02

Heavy Metal Bricolage | 67www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/2, 65–85 observed in the field of popular culture, especially in the modern myth-me- dium of film.5 The concept of bricolage has also proved extremely fruitful for analysing the production and transformation of religious content and prac- tices. Colin Campbell uses the term “bricolage” for his “cultic milieu”, de- scribing it as syncretization.6 Lévi-Strauss used it to describe mythical think- ing in generating new myths that draws on what is already available and is restrained by the component’s initial meaning, an approach that focuses less on individual practices than on structural and impersonal processes. But over time “bricolage” has increasingly become a term for describing the users of culture. Departing from Lévi-Strauss, it “became synonymous with individual creative practices in relation to youth and queer subcultures, new musical genres and techniques, ‘spirituality’, New Age and new religions drawing on multiple sources”.7 Perceiving bricolage only as “eclectic code mixing” shifts away from coherence and pattern in bricolage as organizational forces. It is not only the new composition of previously disparate elements that is important to the concept of bricolage. The interplay of these elements depends on their previous integration and their content is never completely new. It is important that the raw material is already known in the respective culture that forms the framework for the creation of the new sign. Both old sign and new sign remain decodable, with the creation recognizable as an act of transformation.8 The detachment of the elements does not empty the sign of accumulated meanings, but the decontextualization enables the new contextualization. An increasing decontextualization under the influ- ence of modern media sets many religious ideas and motifs free: “It results in a disembedding of the religious, in an omission of origin-specific barriers of access.”9 For the individual bricoleur in particular, this process of disembedding means the possibility of emphasizing subjective experience in the new con- factor) in Lévi-Strauss’s mythical model; see Blumenberg 2006, 299–302. The interpretation of the constitution of mythologues has, however, little influence on the mode of produc- tion of the bricolage. 5 Doniger 2009, 205. 6 Campbell 2002, 15: “The fragmentary tendencies present in the milieu because of the enor- mous diversity of cultural items are more than counteracted by the continuing pressure to syncretization”. 7 Altglas 2014, 474–476. 8 Trummer 2011, 441. 9 Trummer 2011, 141, my translation.