Bricoleur: One who shapes the beautiful and useful out of the dump heap of human life.
An old friend from my finance days — who went on to become an Anglican priest — once called me a bricoleur after French social anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.
Unsure if this was a compliment (or not), I had to look up the word.
Scrappy artisan. Cultural handyman. One who “shapes the beautiful and useful out of the dump heap of human life.”
That is hard to fit on a business card.
The term “jack of all trades (and master of none)” used to rankle me when my father called me that. But now I embrace it. After decades in government, finance, academia and now studying theology, I’ve done a renaissance tour of the major sectors. You learn a thing or two doing that!
- Five years as a civil servant at the Office and Management and Budget taught me how much good government can do, as well as how messy and expensive it is to do it.
- Nineteen years at Freddie Mac taught me a lot about US housing policy, moral hazard, organizational politics…and real politics. And that scandals and disasters actually do happen.
- Six years running a “brick and mortar” retail shop in a coastal Chesapeake town was a rollercoaster of joy and heartbreak. I learned the hard way about the promise and limitations of business in revivifying small town America.
- Two years ago I headed back to school — for help making sense of our fractious world. Studying 16th century theology, 17th century Enlightenment thinkers, American church history, oh, and tons of Bible — is providing some answers — and even glimmers of hope.
Drawing on these varied experiences, I strive to speak freshly into hard conversations about the place of faith in the public square and marketplace. Hints of the transcendent seep into everything I write: from scholarly books and articles to blogs and poetry.
That’s how I bricolage. Rather than turn away from cultural pain, I try to shape something beautiful and useful for understanding.
Susan Wharton Gates, Ph.D, teaches normative theory, public administration and business ethics for Virginia Tech’s Center for Public Administration and Policy and the Pamplin School of Business. A former vice president at Freddie Mac, she is the author of Days of Slaughter: Inside the Fall of Freddie Mac and Why It Could Happen Again (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). Susan is currently pursuing a masters of religion at Reformed Theological Seminary. Her beloved small business, Vintage Picnic, has moved online.
Photo by SwapnIl Dwivedi on Unsplash