Hermann Bausinger (1926–2021): An appreciation

The article offers an appreciation of the Intellectual achievements of the formidable German scholar, Hermann Bausinger whose work, regrettably, remains little known in the Anglo-speaking world. As early as the 1960s he was already exploring the continued existence of folk cultures in the contemporary technological world. In his anlyses of the interfaces of ritual, science and magic, he foreshadowed (by several decades) the later work (in anthropology and technology studies) of scholars such as Alfred Gell and Bruno Latour. In a world in which our smartphone technologies have turned out to be particularly suitable to the widespread transmission of serial forms of fake/post truth and irrational rumours, Bausinger offers us a marvellously coherent and incisive anbysis of such phenomena.