In RPG terms, a term for myth-making by assembling together symbols -- based on a French term for building things out of parts intended for other uses. Chris Lehrich imported the idea to RP Gs by importing an idea of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who likened the process of myth-making to bricolage. From his essay:

Lévi-Strauss's idea, in simple terms, is that cultures think like oddly artistic hobbyists. Imagine you have a basement full of stuff from which to build whatever you like. You have bits of old machines, things your neighbors threw out, scraps of wood, and tail-ends of old projects, as well as the taken-apart bits of all your old projects. Now you decide to build something, and you have some ideas -- aesthetic and practical -- about how that should be done; you are very skilled and talented, and can see possibilities in all sorts of things. But you do not have a Home Depot available, or you consider it "cheating" to go buy things. At any rate, you have to build the thing you're going to build from what you already have in your basement.

A nice example is a Rube Goldberg cartoon, though those are deliberately silly. You fly a kite, and the kite string pulls a lever, and this pushes an old boot, and that turns on your iron, and the iron burns some old pants, and smoke goes into a tree, and.... A brilliant example is the recent Honda advertisement called "the cog," which can readily be found on the Internet. The point is that one constructs an elaborate machine out of bits and pieces already owned.

Lévi-Strauss's point is that each object used contains its own history; that is, the iron has already been used for something and the bricoleur then gives it a new use. The iron, to focus on the single example, is a local source of heat; it can burn pants, or make a grilled-cheese sandwich, and of course can press a shirt. But it cannot be a refrigerator. And if, clever person that you are, you pull the heating coil out of the iron for some project that requires a heating coil, your iron now contains the history of its usage: it is now a heating coil and a heavy weight.

Every sign in myth and ritual, says Lévi-Strauss, is like this iron, and every living mythic culture is like this bricoleur. When faced with a (social) situation, an intellectual problem of whatever kind, the bricoleur begins by running through his memory (the basement) to see what he already has that can be used to solve the problem. He then builds the machine that solves the problem, in the process incorporating the entire history of every object in question, and furthermore altering (however slightly) each object so used; when he goes to build something else, later on, the current project will be part of the history of each object.

Jay Willis (aka Silmenume on The Forge) picked up the idea and suggested that this was the core of Simulationism.

References:

• Ritual Discourse in RPGs (Feb 2004)
• Sim is Bricolage and makes myth - comments? (The Forge, Jan 2005)