L’expérience de l’ ‘Autre’ des missionnaires et le discours anthropologique. À propos des ‘Nouvelles de la presqu’île américaine de Californie’ (1772) du missionnaire jésuite Johann Jakob Baegert

This contribution presents and analyzes the work of the Jesuit missionary Johann Jakob Baegert who was born in Alsatia in 1717 and sent to the Californian Peninsula in the mid-eighteenth century, in a threefold perspective: in the first part the specific characteristics of Baegert’s biography are presented and pointed out; the second part considers Baegert’s main work, the Nachrichten von der Amerikanischen Halbinsel Californien (Nouvelles de la presqu’île américaine de Californie) published in German in 1772 in Mannheim, as an ethnographic counter-discourse directed abstracts 381 against dominant European visions of South America and Lower California, exemplified in the article on the subject published by Bruzen de la Martinière in his Grand Dictionnaire géographique, historique et critique (1723). Finally, the third part of the contribution analyzes the anthropological dimensions of Baegert’s discourse, especially the use of comparisons and the perception of intercultural encounters and cultural particularities in his main work as well as in letters addressed to his brother, which were published in an Alsatian periodical.