In his 1987 study of the role of the anthropologist as author, Clifford Geertz examines the variety of rhetorical strategies deployed in the presentation of ethnographic material. Geertz's is by no means an isolated project; it reflects, rather, the general shift of emphasis in anthropological studies from an analysis of the documentary product (the ethnography as record) to an exploration of the discursive process (the ethnography as narrative). That boundaries have increasingly become blurred between the discursive practices of anthropology and those of fiction is borne out in the significant similarities between two works from the 1980s: Hugh Brody's Maps and Dreams (1981) and Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines (1987). Brody provides a good example of the anthropologist as author: a professional ethnographer whose alertness to the rhetorical impact of his work is demonstrated in the unconventional but persuasive presentation of his ethnographic narratives. Chatwin, by contrast, provides an example of the author as anthropologist: a professional raconteur and travel writer whose personal experience is skilfully transcribed into the contours of pseudo- ethnographic fiction. Maps and Dreams and The Songlines have similar subjects: the critical comparison of Western and Indigenous patterns of territoriality and land use. But Brody and Chatwin have more in common in their respective works than their impassioned defence of Indigenous land rights; for not only do both writers have a strong thesis to present, but also they share a heightened awareness of the narrative means at their disposal.

I shall argue in this chapter that Maps and Dreams and The Songlines can be seen both as sharply worded condemnations of Western materialism and as finely crafted examples of, and inquiries into, ethnographic discourse. In this context, the apparently straightforward titles of each work are disarming; for what seems initially in Maps and Dreams to be a blunt, even naive distinction between a predominantly Western conception of space (the map) and a predominantly non-Western conception of time (the dream) turns out to be a subtle inquiry into the manipulation of time–space metaphors in Western ethnographic discourse. Chatwin's The Songlines is similarly surprising; for while the Aboriginal songlines are discovered, like Western maps, to be forms of territorial negotiation, they are also discovered to be metaphors for the nomadic instincts common to (if, in many cases, unacknowledged by) the human species.