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0:00
Ingold in the last chapter tells you maybe one of the more famous things he said is that anthropology is philosophy with the people in. Many years ago, 1992. Guess that was a while ago. What he meant by that, he says, is that anthropology asks very philosophical questions, which is true. Questions about what it means to be, to know, to think, imagine, perceive, act, remember, learn, live in the company of others,
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administer justice, exercise power, relate to the environment, confront our own mortality. Confront our own mortality. I did just cover this in our intro class. There's a chapter in that class, it's a whole chapter on death, dying, and rituals around dying. So, at the end of the class, I asked them if there was anything they wanted to know about dying. Only one person laughed. I was very disappointed in that. The
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rest sat there like I might be asking them about their demise, their ultimate demise. But instead of just sitting around in a library with the philosophers, anthropologists are supposed to bring in—that's what "the people" is—bringing in humans who have often been excluded from philosophy. And as he got older, he's bringing in some animals too and nonhuman beings, other creatures and souls into the conversation.
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In philosophy, most of the time that you're studying philosophy, you're almost always reading other philosophers. As far as I can tell, there is here an implied criticism of philosophers who would rather shy away from any such engagement, preferring to labor in the library with their canonical texts. So most of the time in philosophy, you read canonical texts. Ingold is trying to say we're bringing in people, real people who have often been excluded from this
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conversation. So yes, Indigenous peoples, peoples that didn't have an education, people who you wouldn't talk to otherwise, who don't even go to the university. And anthropologists go to those people. Not—well, we should be going to them, as Ingold will say, for their wisdom, to learn from them, not just to learn about them. Now, this has long been a principle of anthropology or something like it and
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is expressed in this fairly famous quote from Ruth Benedict. It's maybe not quite as famous as the other quote I may have given you, which is that the purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences. But this is Ruth Benedict. This is from her diaries even before she became an anthropologist. The trouble with life isn't that there is no answer. It's that there are so many answers.
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And what she's talking about here, and the reason she—at least in the context of her anthropology—she's the author of Patterns of Culture, which I showed you about, the 1934 book which would really put the idea of culture into American society and around the world. Before that, people didn't talk about culture that much. And what she's saying is that each culture has its own answer to life in some ways. So the problem isn't that there's
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no answers. It's just, wow, there's so many answers and we can go around and find them. So, anthropologists in general, and I would say Patterns of Culture, Ruth Benedict fits into this, preferred the idea—instead of the idea that there is only one world—that there are many worlds. There's many answers to life. There's all the people in the world and they all have their own answer. Now, why would anthropology—let me just give it a little more
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of a zing—especially in the 1930s in the United States, why would we prefer a many worlds or a many cultures approach? We're between the wars. We are. But things like eugenics are around. People are rolling out intelligence tests, things like that. Skull measuring. That's probably a little bit. Yeah. So, why would anthropologists—well, that's bad for a while—why would we want to emphasize how many different answers there are, many worlds?
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Anthropologists at the time, let me put it this way. Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture was writing explicitly against what she called the jingoism and nationalism of the time. And she said that people are encountering each other and the response is hatred, but it shouldn't be. We should allow that there are all these forms, that we should all be able to live together in a more—she founded the whole idea of cultural relativism, that we would be a more relativistic society.
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That's what was prevalent at the time. When you talk about Boas and historical particularism, the idea at the time was we're the best—as in the United States, the Western way of life is the way of life and everybody else is inferior. They need to be more like us quickly. And the thing is, especially in the 1930s US or around that time, people are coming out with intelligence tests and segregation is in high swing, Jim Crow laws are back on the books.
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So for the anthropologists who are trying to fight against this—I'm talking about the anthropologists who are trying to fight against this idea that there is only one way, the white way. And that was what was coming around. Anthropologists would emphasize that people have each their own world, their own answer, and that those answers were valid answers. There are many answers to life. There's not just one answer. The idea here, as Ingold puts it at the end,
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is the final solution. Hitler's final solution is the final solution. Get rid of them all. Yeah. So, anthropology when it was at its best was fighting against that. In today's world, it is also true—and we keep republishing Benedict's Patterns of Culture—that many anthropologists have wanted to really emphasize again that people live in separate or different worlds. And there's some very good reasons to do that. For one thing,
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ever since at least September 11th, 2001, there's been a whole lot of revamping of stereotypes about savage, evil, barbarian others, which the whole conflict in the Palestinian situation right now or has been for many years is a part of. This comes from this idea that people are off in their own evil world. And so anthropologists have wanted to fight against some of those stereotypes that we thought were gone, but they came back with a vengeance.
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And on the other hand, as I'm sure you know from what's going on in the Trump administration right now, there's a reassertion of this very strident "our way is the right way." Whiteness is back, baby, is what I would say. It's this redeclaration that our way is the right way. And so there are good reasons for why anthropology emphasizes the many worlds. But Ingold is critical of this. He says it sometimes seems that anthropologists
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are constitutionally averse to oneness, to singularity. And likewise obsessed with the plural, never one world, always many worlds. And I confess that I'm probably one of those people who it's like, no, it's not just one thing. There's not just one answer. There's not just one singular answer to life. There's many different answers. Respect diversity, people. Come on. But there are limits to the many worlds or the many cultures approach. First of all,
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does the many cultures approach get rid of that universalism which we were against? Let me say what the universalism was. As I've been saying, it's that only some people have culture. Elite northern westerners. Only some people have art. Only some people have language. Only some people have architecture. And the rest of you just have baby talk and little shacks and probably can't—you don't even have
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culture either. You're too close to nature. You're chasing all those wild animals around. So by saying that there are many cultures, many different cultures, does that help us get rid of this Western universal ideal? No, because the white person can still say their culture is lame. Well, that's one part of it. They can also say they're lame. That is true. We'll get to that. But I would say that before we get to the lame part, when we say you have culture or
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you have art and I'm going to study your art or your culture or your architecture, we're saying that there are these things that are valuable and you have them too. You just have a different version of them, but we're not questioning the root values of that. So, we still impose the universalism on the rest of the world because we're saying that everybody has culture, but we just do it in different ways. Everybody has art,
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but we just do it in different ways. Everybody has architecture, we just do it in different ways. Don't get me wrong, I far prefer that to "you guys suck and you're not biologically capable of architecture." But yes, there's a different end to this, which is does the many cultures approach get rid of the potential for ethnonationalism? And you can be like, yeah, we are so different. We have totally different cultures and art and language. And
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you guys need to go over there because you're too different from us, and maybe your way is fine, but can you do it over there? Don't come over here. I like my way here. You see what I'm saying?
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There can be some parallels between the very fierce kinds of Afrocentrism where everybody belongs in their space. And our guest speaker talked about that a little bit. And that's why he was so cool. He was saying, "I'm not just valuing African values because they're Africa. I'm trying to see them as a real alternative to the West." Because maybe the new cultural ideas are better than the old biological ideas, but they still can be pretty harsh.
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This is the reason we have to keep republishing the old anthropology, because we haven't vanquished these old ideas and we can perpetuate them. So what Ingold is trying to do—and I'll confess that sometimes I feel like he is repeating himself over and over in this chapter, but there's a reason for that, which is that these ways of thinking are so ingrained in us. He's trying to layer metaphor upon metaphor, but we'll try.
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One of the things he's trying to do is rethink the whole idea of the plural as opposed to the singular. And I did like this example. I didn't even realize this. You have the Inuk, which means soul and is a singular soul. But Inuit is the plural of Inuk. So you have the Inuit people. That would be the plural. But the thing is, apparently they do not mean that you can just count up all the individual souls
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and talk about, oh, the Inuit of Greenland, and the Inuit of—oh, are we going to get those guys? When we acquire Greenland, we get all the Inuit there, and then we can get the Inuit of Canada. The Inuit have been used to argue against the idea that hunter-gatherers have less sophisticated technologies than agriculturalists, because in order to hunt whales, the amount of stuff you need is quite much more than a digging stick. Let's put it that way.
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In any case, the plural Inuit apparently is not something that you could count. It means something more like soul life going on in and around this place. Ingold is trying to argue that this relation of part to whole—or that a society is not just the sum of individuals. It's something quite different. And we have to rethink the plural or how our society or our life works, not as the countenance of individuals, and also rethink the soul itself.
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How should we think of the soul? Which one is correct? Why? Oh, the eddies in the stream. Yes, I keep coming back to it. Yes, you're right. The left is what Ingold wants us to think of. Souls emerge as formations in the current of life versus the idea that they're contained and interact only by way of their exterior bodies. So, in various places in this chapter, he talks again about the soul as a form of movement. It's arranged in the turbulence of life.
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If the soul is that turbulent movement, we also need to in some ways rethink the ground. What did James Gibson think the ground was? Yeah. Gibson is the one where the ground is the plane of indifference and everything just plops on it. So there's my plane of indifference. This is the idea. The ground is just a floor or a platform or a hard surface that we put things on. Has anyone—a New York City person? When they drop something on the ground, they call it
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the floor. You've never heard this? I've never heard. No. They'll be walking down the sidewalk and they'll drop something. They pick that up off the floor. For them, it's all the floor. So, in Gibson's view—this was crazy. And it's, by the way, this has nothing to do with Suzuki's view. It's the opposite. It's related. They're still talking about the ground. The furniture. "Just as chairs, tables, and cupboards are
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set upon the floor," he explains, "so hills, trees, and buildings are set upon the ground." This was hard for me to even think about. I can understand a building being set on the ground. We talked about that. How they're driving down the road and they plop a building down? So, I know about that one. But trees, setting them on the ground. That's a house that hasn't been built yet. Oh, we'll get to that. The hill though, that got to me. You're setting a hill
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on the ground. That seemed weird. Unless you're building an earthwork. Yeah. Oh, maybe some of those landfills. Do they grow up? Forgotten. Yeah. Boom. Boom. Boom. Anyway, so this is Gibson's view of the ground. It's the floor just like the New Yorkers. Whereas Suzuki has this ground of differentiation. What's that like? Yeah, the ground is—you don't plop a hill. The hill is the ground, for God's sakes. Come on, people. You plop a hill onto the ground.
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That's ridiculous. So, you have the hill and the tree obviously grows out of the ground. You don't plop a tree into—well, if you're planting a tree, you plop it into the ground, but it still has to grow out of the ground. That's the whole point of a tree. And you said that that tree is just a house waiting to be—well, but it's not necessarily that far-fetched because of the Japanese floorboards. That's
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what you meant. I was looking for traditional Japanese stuff. This is updated. And but I like it because it's all wood. You got the wood in the ceiling and the wood on the floor. It's all wood. Yes, it's the kitchen. It is the kitchen. I really like this. Suzuki says the floorboards of the traditional Japanese house, Suzuki tells us, virtually grow into the inhabitants who walk them, which may be why the whole you don't want to wear shoes
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in an Asian house because your feet might not grow. Just as the trees from which the boards were made once grew from the earth. There you go. Here the ground is no more indifferent to the trees than are floorboards to people. Rather trees and people arise from the earth and from boards respectively in an ongoing process of differentiation. And we talked about this only one class ago. How you'd have the tree grows and
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then it's cut down. It has a second life as it covers us up and cares for us. All right. Maybe that's not the best floorboard. Maybe that's not the best architecture. But still the floorboards—you grow into people or you grow into them. So now for most of us, what Ingold is saying is it corresponds to our idea of what diversity is. So let us say that I'm here and I look around and I say there's not much diversity here. I need some
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more diversity. Boom. Now, usually if you think about the way diversity is thought of in our society—as in there's either too much of it or too little of it—we're usually quantifying it. There's not enough. Either there's too much diversity or not enough. And to get diversity, as Ingold says, you cut people out from somewhere else and you bring them in. So bring in some more diversity. And I say, "Hey, we need some another person." And then these people say, "Wait a second,
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there's something missing here. We need more diversity." What should we bring in? I was hoping you'd say this. Oh, a woman. That's so true. I thought about that. This is our vision of diversity. It's like, wait, we need a woman in here. It's not diverse. Yeah. Is this enough diversity? Did we have enough? This idea that it can be added and subtracted from life. So, in this other view, we have—so, that was my view. Now,
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the left side is the bad side. The figure is mounted on the ground of indifference. There it is. The ground is indifferent to what is on it. The figure arises as a fold in the ground itself. I once tried to draw this for you before. Yeah, I did. People as folds in the ground emerging out of the ground. Yeah. Revisiting some stuff here. So, the difference is between diversity and differentiation. Well, issues of diversity
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are hugely political, right? And how should we think of that? And obviously the cutout model of diversity where people plop in and plop out has been a failure. It's easily discarded. Let's put it that way. But if people are folds in the earth and you can't discard them, you can't cut them out without losing a part of yourself. If you're saying that human difference is not just diversity but is essential to our survival as a species, then I can't leave you out.
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Diversity and differentiation. The sheet, the creases. Yeah. Imagine lifting a sheet to form a crease. We register the line of the crease, yet the crease is still in the sheet. So again, he's talking about how differentiation is different from diversity because diversity is when you take something out of place and you put it all together, plop plop plop. Whereas what he's talking about is differentiation, where it's the ground in the fold.
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And so if a wave is a fold in the earth or a cloud is a fold in the sky, it's like this. You have a crease. The crease—you can still see the crease, but there's nothing different about the sheet. The sheet is still the sheet. So that every distinguishing feature arises as a fold in the ground. I'm coming out of the fold. And try again. Just as with the crease in the sheet, the particularity of the singular life
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distinguishes itself from the universality of life itself. The life of the soul from soul life. Without the universal distinguishing itself from the particular. So you can have particular and universal, but they're not opposed. You're going along in your life and you have your life, but you're part of life, the big life too. So the universal—how should we think of the universal? That sounds good. Maybe if
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you reorganize sentences. So the universal is not the lowest common denominator. Okay, so it's not the lowest common denominator. It is a field of continuous variation. It is not a plane of indifference upon which diversity is overlaid, but a plane of immanence from which differences continually emerge. It's a different way than we usually think. We usually think about the universal as being like the thing that everybody has and they have particular lives on top of that,
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which are either manifestations of that or variations on it. But in this world it would be a plane of immanence from which differences continually emerge. So here's the question: if my soul is just a crease-fold in the world of turbulent movement, how can I act as an individual? Right? Because who's me then? I'm just lost in the currents of life here. I'm just a floating eddy of soul power spinning
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around like a whorl. Am I being—am I acting? Can I act or am I just being acted upon? And Ingold says that this has to do with the way we think about language. Usually in most
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Indo-European languages, we divide verbs up into active and passive. Ingold is a little more careful here. He says, "However, many non-European languages as well as Indo-European in earlier times, such as in classical Greek, recognize what linguists call the middle voice of the verb," which I don't know what that is because all I have is active and passive. What is the middle voice? He's not saying this is absent from—he does specify, in many non-European languages.
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And that it was also present in many Indo-European languages in earlier times. So he's not trying to say that it's absent from Indo-European. It's just that we tend to, in the contemporary European languages, divide life into active and passive verbs. He's looking for other ideas to express that. And in that idea, then life becomes a task. It's our task, which is in some ways given to us, but we are tasked with doing it.
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I started to think about that. What is my task in life? Very different way to think about life. So at the very end, we start to get—he starts to agree with Arturo Escobar's idea of the pluriverse. The pluriverse for Escobar is earth as a living whole is continually emerging. So it's both a whole but it's emerging again. And the thing is, Ingold is drawing on potentially lots of different sources for these ideas to try and get us to rethink how we've been taught.
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Now at the very end, there was a very great section on what I would call how to do anthropology or how to do participant observation. And Ingold condemns most anthropologists, saying that most anthropologists converse with others not for what they have to tell, but for what it tells about them. You said there was a disconnect between many ethnographies and what seemed—they just didn't seem to get at people. I agree.
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And that's in some way an artifact of what you're supposed to produce at the end of it. So even if you interact with people as individuals, at the end you're asked to write about them as a culture. And you're supposed to turn it in as your ethnography of the culture. What Ingold is saying is that what anthropologists do is they momentarily align. Maybe it's two weeks, maybe it's two years, but it's for a time they're with the other people,
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only to shear away into the stance of interpretation and analysis. So you do your research and then you come back and you write your thing. And so what you're doing then is you are coming up with a description of another society or a culture. What should we do instead? What would true participant observation entail? At least according to Ingold. Well, you're trying to be part of it, but there's something else about
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that. What would it really mean? Like in Ingold's terms, what does it mean instead of—think about this. Converse with others not for what they have to tell, but for what it tells about them. So, I'm there asking you a bunch of questions and talking with you because I want to write about your society. What's the different version of this, which sometimes we can all use in our lives? Yeah, feel others feeling you. I like that. Empathy. Just don't get too close. Yeah,
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you don't want to feel up too much. But true participant observation would be to join in the conversation and talk to them in the hopes that they're going to tell you something that you can take as real wisdom. Not just like this is their wisdom about their society. No, this is wisdom about me and my society and my life. You'd think that that would be it. But oftentimes we just contextualize people and we put them into
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boxes and we say, "Well, this is what the Inuit do when they're out there hunting whales." But it doesn't have anything to do with me because I'm over here and I'm going to hunt whales in my own way. A big high-powered rifle. Shotguns won't do anything against a whale. I knew that.
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So, how are we doing? Oh, we're doing great. I want to go back to this quote from Ruth Benedict. The trouble—this is very Instagrammable by the way. This is one of the—going through—there's no whales there. But the trouble with life isn't that there is no answer. There are so many answers. And Ingold agrees with Benedict. I don't know if he's that far from Benedict. I was trying to figure out if they were the same or different. Ingold,
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he's been wanting to reorient ourselves along this other axis. So for Ingold, he says life is a question to which there is no answer. It's not that there's many answers. There's no answer. But in this one world of ours, we are all tasked with looking for it. And it is in the search that all life is lived. And it is just as well that there is no final solution. Thank goodness for that. Indeed, that would put an end to us all.
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Ingold is not trying to overturn the world here. He's trying to introduce us to another axis of life. And I appreciate Benedict's work on this. I really do. But this one is perhaps more important. That could have been the end. But there's a couple more things to talk about. Which is why are people different? Why are people different? First he says, people are—why are they—why people are different not because they belong to other worlds. So that's
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what we know. It's not that we're all living in different worlds. But because they are—that is one of my favorite Ingold phrases—they are fellow travelers in the same world. Fellow travelers in the same world. And it's one of my favorite Ingold phrases because I looked back into his Perception of the Environment when he talks about hunters and gatherers and scientists and he says they're not different. He has this wonderful phrase where he says the people who call themselves
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scientists and the people who the scientists call hunter-gatherers—because it's the scientists who call themselves scientists and also call other people hunter-gatherers—are not separated out because they're in different worlds. He wrote that they are fellow passengers in this world of ours. Now 20 years later, I looked it up and in the first book he uses the word "fellow passengers" a lot. Decent amount. But here we're fellow travelers. What do you think? Yeah,
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we take action. We're not passengers. Yeah, passengers is too passive. Travelers is—yeah, it's a little bit more active. It's middle voice. You still have to be borne along. You're still traveling along. But yeah, we're up to fellow travelers. And just to drive this home: a world nonetheless of inexhaustible and interminable variation. So it's the world that continues to generate this beautiful variation.
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