ABSTRACT
The emergence of a substantial body of ethnographic images of Amazonians was delayed for several decades and the popularization of the cliched image set was consolidated not only by the cartes de visite/travel image industry, but also through expression via other genres and media. The relative absence of a social Amazonia was not an original condition but the outcome of hundreds of years of contact. Bates's and Wallace's texts include accounts of encounters with many different kinds of Amazonians; although not systematic, the ethnographic content is substantial. It is itself a clich to say that images of Amazonia are stereotypical and in some respects the origins of key relationships between clich and stereotype are far from obscure. Even as a narrowly defined anthropological object, Amazonia is fragmented, but there is a general notion especially among Indianists who tend to provide the focus for sociocultural anthropological research of a division of labour among symbolists, structuralists, and cultural ecologists.
