Until very recently, South American rainforest Indians were portrayed either as timeless, bounded and atomistic societies adapted intimately to their natural surroundings or as historically altered, deculturated and marginalised groups corrupted by colonial or global agents. This dichotomous viewpoint has been overturned by a spate of new studies that have emphasised dynamic processes of ethnogenesis and identity construction, historically situated strategies of resistance and accommodation to shifting environmental forces, the complex interplay of political, economic and cultural factors operating at different scales, and the creative collective consciousness and representations of local groups in the process of their (re)formation.