Anthropological theory: evolutionism, diffusionism, functionalism, structuralism, postmodernism
Anchor (Master): Geertz, C. — The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)
Intuition Beginner
Anthropology's theoretical history reflects changing answers to one question: how should we understand cultural differences? In the 19th century, early anthropologists like Edward Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan proposed that all societies evolve through the same stages, from "savagery" through "barbarism" to "civilization." This unilineal evolutionism ranked European societies at the top.
Franz Boas (1858-1942), the founder of American anthropology, rejected this. He argued that each culture has its own unique history and must be understood on its own terms, a position called historical particularism. In Britain, Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown developed functionalism, analyzing how cultural practices serve social and psychological needs.
Claude Levi-Strauss then revolutionized the field with structuralism, searching for universal patterns of human thought hidden beneath cultural diversity. In the 1970s and 1980s, Clifford Geertz argued that culture is like a text to be interpreted, and postmodern anthropologists questioned whether objective knowledge of other cultures is even possible.
Each theory captured something real but partial. Evolutionism noticed that societies change. Diffusionism noticed that cultures borrow from one another. Functionalism noticed that practices serve purposes. Structuralism noticed that the mind organises through contrast. Interpretive anthropology noticed that meaning matters. Postmodernism noticed that the observer is never neutral. Together they form a layered toolkit rather than a single correct view.
Visual Beginner
| Theory | Era | Key figures | Core claim |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unilineal evolutionism | 1860s-1890s | Tylor, Morgan | All societies pass through the same stages |
| Diffusionism | 1890s-1920s | Graebner, Elliot Smith, Perry | Customs spread from centres of origin |
| Historical particularism | 1900s-1940s | Boas | Each culture has its own unique history |
| Functionalism | 1920s-1950s | Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown | Practices serve individual or social needs |
| Structuralism | 1940s-1970s | Levi-Strauss | The mind organises reality through binary oppositions |
| Symbolic / interpretive | 1960s-1980s | Geertz, Turner, Douglas | Culture is a system of meanings to interpret |
| Postmodern / reflexive | 1980s-present | Clifford, Marcus, Behar | Knowledge is partial, situated, and constructed |
| Concept | Definition |
|---|---|
| Cultural relativism | Understanding each culture on its own terms |
| Thick description | Interpreting behaviour by recovering the meanings actors give it |
| Binary opposition | A fundamental contrast (raw/cooked, nature/culture) structuring thought |
| Reflexivity | Awareness of how the researcher's position shapes knowledge |
| Habitus | Durable dispositions generating practice without conscious rules |
| Positionality | Acknowledging the situated standpoint of the knower |
Worked example Beginner
Example 1: One practice, five theories
Consider a harvest festival in a farming community. A 19th-century evolutionist might classify it as a "primitive" religious stage on the road to civilisation. Boas would insist on understanding the festival's specific local history. A functionalist would ask what social or psychological need it meets. A structuralist would search for the oppositions it enacts. An interpretive anthropologist would read the ritual as a text thick with local meaning.
The same festival yields different insights under each lens. No single theory captures everything. The value of learning the history of anthropological theory is acquiring multiple frameworks for asking different questions about the same cultural phenomenon.
Example 2: Functionalism and the kula ring
Malinowski's study of the kula ring illustrates functionalism. Trobriand Islanders exchanged shell necklaces and armbands across hundreds of miles of ocean. A casual observer might see pointless ceremony. Malinowski showed the exchange created alliances, established social rank, and bound island communities into a durable network.
The practice functioned to maintain the social system. This was a rejection of the evolutionist assumption that "primitive" economies were simple barter. The kula ring revealed elaborate social and symbolic complexity invisible to outsiders who lacked sustained fieldwork.
Example 3: Structuralism and myth
Levi-Strauss analysed myths as logical systems. Tracing one Native American myth cycle across hundreds of variants, he found the stories differed on the surface but shared an underlying structure built on the raw/cooked and nature/culture oppositions.
This led him to argue that the human mind universally organises reality through binary contrasts. The specific myths vary; the deep grammar does not. Whether or not one accepts this claim, the method showed that cultural materials can be analysed for hidden structural patterns rather than only for their surface content.
Check your understanding Beginner
Formal definition Intermediate+
19th-century evolutionism
Edward Tylor (1832-1917) gave anthropology its foundational definition of culture as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." He also proposed that religion evolves through stages, from animism (spirits inhere in natural objects) through polytheism to monotheism. Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881), in Ancient Society (1877), divided human progress into three stages, savagery, barbarism, and civilization, keyed to technological milestones (fire, pottery, agriculture, writing, iron). Both assumed all societies travel the same road. The framework was ethnocentric, ranking contemporary European societies as the apex, but Morgan's stage scheme influenced Marx and Engels, who drew on it for The Origin of the Family.
Diffusionism
Diffusionism held that cultural innovations are rare and that most practices spread outward from a few centres of origin. Fritz Graebner proposed Kulturkreise (culture circles) in German-language anthropology, tracing trait complexes outward from primordial centres. Grafton Elliot Smith and William J. Perry advanced hyperdiffusionism, claiming that civilisation diffused from a single source, Egypt, to the rest of the world. The extreme version was untenable, but the underlying question, independent invention versus borrowing, remains important. Boas accepted that diffusion occurs but argued that borrowed traits are reinterpreted in locally specific ways, undermining any simple transmission model.
Historical particularism (Boas)
Franz Boas transformed American anthropology by rejecting evolutionary schemes. His historical particularism held that each culture has its own unique developmental trajectory and must be studied through its own history rather than fitted onto a universal ladder. Three commitments follow. Cultural relativism: each culture must be understood on its own terms before comparison. Anti-racism: Boas measured immigrant head shapes and showed they changed with environment, refuting the racial determinism that underpinned unilineal evolutionism. The four-field approach: integrating cultural, biological, linguistic, and archaeological evidence to grasp humanity in its full complexity. Boas trained a generation, including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston, who carried his programme into diverse research areas.
Functionalism
British social anthropology produced two varieties. Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), working in the Trobriand Islands, developed psychological functionalism. He argued that every custom serves individual biological and psychological needs. His Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) documented the kula ring, an exchange system linking islands across hundreds of miles, demonstrating that "primitive" economies rest on complex social and symbolic logics rather than simple barter. A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) developed structural-functionalism, in which practices are explained by how they maintain the social system, not individual needs. His work on the Andaman Islanders analysed rituals as mechanisms sustaining social solidarity. The shared weakness is teleology: if everything that exists is functional, the framework cannot explain dysfunction, conflict, or historical change.
Structuralism
Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009) drew on structural linguistics (Saussure) and information theory to search for universal structures of the human mind. His central claim: the mind organises reality through binary oppositions, raw/cooked, nature/culture, in-group/out-group. Myths, kinship systems, and classification systems are logical structures whose surface variation conceals a deep grammar. The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) proposed alliance theory: the incest taboo forces groups to exchange marriage partners, creating social bonds through reciprocity, and kinship systems are variations on this exchange logic. The Mythologiques cycle traced myth transformations across hundreds of Native American variants. Critiques: structuralism is too formal, ignores history and individual agency, and rests on speculative interpretations that resist empirical testing.
Symbolic and interpretive anthropology
Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) shifted focus from causes to meanings. His method, thick description, recovers the layers of meaning actors themselves attach to behaviour. A twitch, a wink, and a parody of a wink are physically similar but semantically distinct; the anthropologist's task is to read the difference. Religion, in Geertz's definition, is "a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations." Victor Turner analysed ritual through symbols, liminality (threshold states), and communitas (egalitarian fellow-feeling). Mary Douglas, in Purity and Danger (1966), treated pollution beliefs as classification systems that mark boundaries, showing that what counts as dirt is "matter out of place."
Key result: paradigm succession and the limits of each school Intermediate+
The history of anthropological theory is best read not as progress toward a single correct framework but as a succession of paradigms, each rising to correct the blind spots of its predecessor. The key result is that no single theoretical school exhausts the phenomenon of culture; each captures one dimension and is superseded when its limitations become unbearable.
Unilineal evolutionism imposed order on cultural diversity but was undone by its ethnocentrism and its inability to account for independent invention. Diffusionism corrected the assumption that all societies travel the same road, but hyperdiffusionism collapsed under its own extremity. Boasian particularism restored empirical rigour and cultural relativism but struggled to generate cross-cultural generalisation. Functionalism explained how practices work but could not explain why they change or whom they harm. Structuralism revealed hidden cognitive patterns but was charged with formalism and historical blindness.
Geertz's interpretive turn redirected attention from function and structure to meaning, insisting that culture is a text to be read rather than a machine to be diagrammed. This opened the door to the postmodern critique: if culture is a text, then the anthropologist is an author, and ethnographic authority is constructed, partial, and politically positioned. Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) argued that classic ethnographies presented the observer's voice as objective while erasing the dialogical encounter that produced them.
The cumulative result is a discipline that has traded certainty for self-awareness. Contemporary anthropology is theoretically pluralist: most practitioners draw eclectically on functionalist, structuralist, interpretive, and reflexive resources depending on the question. The succession itself is the lesson. Each theory is both a tool and a caution: a way of seeing that is also a way of not seeing.
Exercises Intermediate+
Advanced results Master
Postmodern and reflexive anthropology
The publication of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) marks the postmodern turn in anthropology. The volume's central argument: ethnography is always partial, situated, and textual. The anthropologist does not record a culture; the anthropologist authors a representation of it. Classic monographs presented the observer's voice as authoritative and omniscient while concealing the dialogical encounters, misunderstandings, and power asymmetries that produced the text. Once this construction is exposed, ethnographic authority can no longer claim neutrality.
The consequences were far-reaching. Anthropologists began experimenting with dialogic and multi-vocal formats, foregrounding their own positionality and the voices of interlocutors. The question of "speaking for" the Other became central: who has the right to represent whom, and under what conditions? The critique also intersected with feminism, postcolonialism, and indigenous scholarship, each of which showed that the classic ethnographic subject was never generic but always gendered, racialised, and embedded in colonial histories.
Critics of the postmodern turn charged that it risked relativising knowledge to the point of paralysis. If all representation is constructed, what grounds distinguish better ethnography from worse? Most contemporary anthropologists adopt a reflexive but empirically committed posture: acknowledging positionality without abandoning the goal of producing reliable, falsifiable claims about cultural life.
Feminist anthropology
Feminist anthropology exposed the gendered silences in classic ethnography. Early studies often generalised from male informants, treating men's experiences as the culture's default. Behar's The Vulnerable Observer (1996) argued that emotion and positionality are not contaminants to be stripped away but resources for understanding. Abu-Lughod's Writing Women's Worlds (1993) challenged the "culture" concept itself, arguing that writing about "a culture" flattens internal differences of gender, class, and generation. Her concept of "halfies," binational anthropologists straddling the communities they study, destabilised the insider/outsider binary.
Visweswaran's Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (1994) probed the narrative conventions that shape ethnographic claims about women. The broader contribution of feminist anthropology was methodological as well as substantive: it made positionality, reflexivity, and the politics of representation permanent concerns of the discipline, not optional add-ons.
Postcolonial anthropology
Postcolonial critique examined anthropology's entanglement with colonial power. Asad's Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973) asked why the discipline that studied non-Western peoples developed almost exclusively in the colonial metropoles, and what this asymmetry meant for the knowledge it produced. Trouillot's Global Transformations (2003) argued that anthropology was constituted by a "savage slot," a discursive position that defined its object as the exotic Other against which the modern West defined itself.
Pels analysed colonial ethnography as a form of governmentality, showing how ethnographic categories were appropriated by colonial administration. Said's Orientalism (1978), though not written by an anthropologist, profoundly shaped the discipline's self-understanding by demonstrating how scholarly knowledge production participates in the power it claims merely to describe. The lasting effect is an insistence that anthropological knowledge cannot be separated from the political conditions of its production.
Practice theory
Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), developed through fieldwork among the Kabyle of Algeria, addressed the structure-versus-agency impasse. Habitus names the durable, embodied dispositions that generate practice without conscious deliberation. Doxa names the unquestioned assumptions that structure experience as self-evident common sense. Symbolic violence names the power that secures compliance by making domination appear natural and legitimate rather than coercive.
Sherry Ortner's influential essay "Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties" (1984) diagnosed the gap between grand structural models and the lived practices of individuals, arguing that practice theory offered a way to theorise how agents both reproduce and transform the structures that shape them. The contribution is a framework in which neither structure nor agency is reduced to the other: structured structures (habitus) generate structuring action.
World anthropologies
The call to provincialise Euro-American anthropology has produced a sustained effort to recognise anthropological traditions outside the North Atlantic. Restrepo and Escalarite, and Gustavo Ribeiro, have mapped "world anthropologies" and "anthropologies of the South," arguing that the discipline's dominant institutions have treated non-Western scholars as native informants rather than as theorists.
Latin American social anthropology developed distinctive traditions shaped by indigenismo, dependency theory, and commitments to applied research. Indian anthropology has negotiated the tension between colonial-era categories and postcolonial critique. The debate is not merely demographic; it concerns epistemic diversity: which questions get asked, which methods count as rigorous, and whose theorising is cited. The world anthropologies movement insists that anthropology is plural, not singular, and that its centre of gravity is shifting.
The ontological turn
The ontological turn asks whether anthropology studies different perspectives on one nature (multiculturalism) or different natures themselves (multinaturalism). Viveiros de Castro's Cannibal Metaphysics (2014) drew on Amazonian perspectivism to argue that what Western ontology treats as a single nature with multiple cultural perspectives is better understood as a single culture (the human perspective) applied to multiple natures. This inverts the standard relativist framework.
Latour's We Have Never Been Modern (1993) argued that the modernist separation of nature from society was never actually achieved, and that hybrid collectives of humans and nonhumans have always existed. Descola's Beyond Nature and Culture (2013) proposed four ontologies: animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism, each defining the continuities and discontinuities between humans and nonhumans differently. Ingold critiqued these schemes as over-formal and ahistorical, while Bird-David argued for animist relational epistemologies grounded in concrete practices rather than abstract schemata.
Multi-species and environmental anthropology
Multi-species anthropology decentres the human. Kohn's How Forests Think (2013) argued that semiosis, the production of signs, extends beyond the human, and that the forest itself is a thinking system in which humans participate. Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) followed the matsutake mushroom across global supply chains, using it as a lens onto multispecies entanglement in capitalist ruins.
Haraway's work on companion species argued that beings become what they are through co-constitution with others, undermining the bounded individualism of Western thought. De la Cadena's work on Andean "earth beings" examined how indigenous ontologies attribute agency to mountains and landscapes, challenging the modernist ontology in which only humans possess agency. Tsao has offered an ethnocentric critique, asking whether multi-species frameworks universalise a particular, privileged relationship to nature. The contribution is an anthropology that takes nonhuman actors seriously as participants in social worlds.
Affect theory and the sensory
Affect theory attends to the atmospheres, moods, and embodied intensities that shape social life below the threshold of conscious meaning. Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary Affects (2007) traced the rippling, contagious quality of everyday feeling. Bubandt's work on haunted geographies explored how spectral presences shape political life in Southeast Asia. Navaro analysed affect and atmosphere as material forces in political conflict.
Methodologically, the sensory turn has produced innovations: sound walks that map acoustic ecologies, sensory ethnography (Pink) that foregrounds embodied attention to texture, smell, and sound, and experimental writing that attempts to convey affective experience rather than only describe it. The contribution is a recognition that culture is felt as well as thought, and that methods tuned only to meaning and structure miss dimensions of experience that actors themselves often cannot articulate.
Infrastructure and the material turn
The material turn examines how nonhuman things, technologies, and built systems shape social life. Larkin's work on infrastructure in Nigeria showed that infrastructure functions simultaneously as poetry and politics: it organises collective life and generates affective attachment. Bennett's Vibrant Matter (2010) argued for "thing power," the capacity of nonhuman materials to produce effects independent of human intention.
Anand's Hydraulic City (2017) traced how Mumbai's water infrastructure produces citizenship and social hierarchy through differential access. Von Schnitzler examined how infrastructure in South Africa became a medium through which citizenship and political belonging were negotiated. New materialism in anthropology insists that the social cannot be understood apart from its material infrastructures, and that things are not passive backdrops but active participants in the constitution of social worlds.
Public and engaged anthropology
Public and engaged anthropology insists that the discipline has obligations beyond the academy. Scheper-Hughes's Death Without Weeping (1992) was an activist ethnography of mothers and child mortality in Northeast Brazil, refusing the stance of neutral observation. Paul Farmer's work with Partners In Health modelled an engaged anthropology in which ethnographic insight directly informs health interventions among the poor.
Lamphere advocated for anthropology that works with communities rather than merely studying them. Hale examined the relationship between activism and research. The institutionalisation of engaged anthropology has raised questions about accountability, the ethics of advocacy, and the tension between scholarly independence and political commitment. Participatory action research, in which community members are co-researchers rather than subjects, represents one structurally developed answer. The trend reflects a discipline increasingly aware that the conditions under which it produces knowledge are themselves part of what it must study.
Connections Master
Connections to philosophy
Anthropological theory has always drawn on and contributed to philosophy. Levi-Strauss's structuralism descended from Saussurean linguistics and, through it, from semiotics and the philosophy of language. Geertz's interpretive anthropology drew on Wittgenstein, Ricoeur, and the hermeneutic tradition. Practice theory (Bourdieu) drew on phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) and the philosophy of action. The ontological turn engages metaphysics directly: what kinds of beings exist, and who gets to decide. Postcolonial anthropology's engagement with Said, Spivak, and Bhabha links it to postcolonial philosophy and critical theory.
Connections to sociology
Anthropology and sociology share theoretical ancestors in Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. The split was traditionally along object (non-Western versus Western societies) and method (ethnography versus survey). These boundaries have largely dissolved. Bourdieu and Giddens are read in both disciplines. Practice theory, structuralism, and the cultural turn cross the boundary freely. The main residual difference is ethnographic depth: anthropology's commitment to long-term fieldwork provides a check on the abstractions that large-scale survey methods can generate.
Connections to literary theory
The interpretive and postmodern turns bound anthropology to literary theory. Geertz's culture-as-text metaphor drew on the same hermeneutic resources as reader-response criticism. The Writing Culture debate applied tools from literary analysis, attention to genre, voice, authorship, and rhetoric, to ethnographic writing itself. Clifford Hayes, James Clifford, and Vincent Crapanzano experimented with narrative forms borrowed from fiction and autobiography. The result is a cross-pollination in which ethnographic writing is understood as craft as well as scholarship.
Connections to linguistics
Structuralism's debt to Saussure is foundational: language as a system of differences without positive terms became the model for analysing myth, kinship, and classification. Dell Hymes and John Gumperz bridged linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, developing the ethnography of speaking. The ontological turn's attention to how language constitutes reality continues this lineage, asking whether different languages disclose different worlds rather than merely labelling the same one differently.
Connections to history
The discipline boundary between anthropology (synchronic, ethnographic) and history (diachronic, archival) has collapsed substantially. The Annales school's attention to long-duration social structures drew on anthropological concepts. Ethnohistory uses colonial archives to reconstruct the histories of peoples who left no written records. The "invention of tradition" thesis (Hobsbawm and Ranger) is now a shared tool. Postcolonial anthropology insists that every apparently timeless "traditional" practice has a history, often one shaped by colonial encounter, and that treating cultures as static is itself a colonial inheritance.
Historical and philosophical context Master
The evolutionary foundations (1860s-1890s)
Anthropology professionalised in the second half of the 19th century under the spell of Darwinian evolution, though the social application preceded careful empirical work. Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) and Morgan's Ancient Society (1877) assumed that all societies ascend a single ladder of progress. This was armchair anthropology: theorists synthesised reports from missionaries, traders, and colonial administrators without conducting fieldwork themselves. The scheme was ethnocentric, ranking contemporary European civilisation as the apex toward which all peoples either had climbed or were climbing. Yet it gave the fledgling discipline a unifying narrative and a comparative ambition that survived the collapse of its specific claims.
The Boasian revolution (1890s-1940s)
Franz Boas dismantled the evolutionary edifice. His measurements of immigrant children showed that cranial shape, the era's supposed racial marker, changed with environment, refuting biological determinism. His insistence on sustained fieldwork, language learning, and attention to local history replaced speculative comparison with empirical rigour. Historical particularism held that each culture is the product of a unique trajectory of diffusion, invention, and adaptation. Cultural relativism, methodological rather than moral, required understanding each culture on its own terms before comparison. Boas trained Mead, Benedict, Hurston, and Montagu, institutionalising the four-field approach in American departments and establishing anti-racism as a disciplinary commitment.
British functionalism (1920s-1950s)
While Boas reshaped American anthropology, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown established British social anthropology. Malinowski's Trobriand fieldwork (1915-1918) set the standard for intensive participant observation. His psychological functionalism explained customs as meeting individual needs. Radcliffe-Brown's structural-functionalism, developed through work on the Andaman Islanders and Australian Aboriginal groups, explained institutions by their contribution to social equilibrium. Evans-Pritchard's studies of the Nuer and the Azande demonstrated the analytical power of the approach while also, in his later turn toward interpretive social anthropology, pointing beyond it. The British tradition emphasised social structure over culture, and comparison over particularism.
French structuralism (1940s-1970s)
Levi-Strauss, influenced by Roman Jakobson and structural linguistics, sought the universal grammar of the human mind. Binary oppositions (nature/culture, raw/cooked) structured not only myth and ritual but kinship and classification. The Mythologiques traced myth transformations across the Americas with an ambition and formal rigour unmatched before or since. Structuralism's influence extended into literary criticism, philosophy (Foucault, early Lacan), and semiotics. The decline from the 1970s reflected accumulating critiques: it was too formal, indifferent to history and power, and dependent on interpretations that could not be tested. Its emphasis on the cognitive dimension of culture, however, persists in linguistic and cognitive anthropology.
Symbolic and interpretive turns (1960s-1980s)
Geertz redirected anthropology from causal explanation to interpretive understanding. Thick description recovered the meanings actors attach to their own behaviour, treating culture as a text to be read. Turner's analysis of ritual symbols, liminality, and communitas showed that ritual is not mere epiphenomenon but a generative site of social transformation. Douglas's work on pollution and classification demonstrated that seemingly irrational taboos encode systematic worldviews. This turn reconnected anthropology with the humanities and laid the groundwork for the reflexivity that followed, since interpreting a text inevitably raises the question of who is reading and from where.
The postmodern moment (1980s-1990s)
Writing Culture (1986) crystallised a diffuse unease into a systematic critique. Ethnography was reframed as a literary genre whose authority rested on rhetorical conventions rather than transparent access to reality. Feminist, postcolonial, and indigenous scholars demonstrated that the supposedly generic ethnographic subject was always gendered, racialised, and embedded in colonial relations. The crisis of representation was productive: it generated experimental ethnographic forms, collaborative methods, and sustained attention to positionality. It also generated anxiety about epistemic relativism. The resolution most anthropologists reached was reflexive empiricism: committed to fieldwork and evidence, but honest about the constructed and positioned nature of all knowledge claims.
Contemporary pluralism (2000s-present)
Contemporary anthropology is theoretically plural and methodologically inventive. The ontological turn reopens foundational questions about what kinds of beings exist and who has authority to say so. Multi-species and environmental anthropology extends the analytic beyond the human. Affect theory and the sensory turn attend to dimensions of experience that meaning-centred approaches miss. Infrastructure and new materialism foreground nonhuman actants. Engaged and public anthropology reconnects the discipline with the communities and publics it claims to serve. World anthropologies challenges the North Atlantic monopoly on theoretical production. The common thread is that no single school any longer aspires to be the framework. The succession of paradigms has become an inheritance of tools, each available for deployment, each carrying the memory of its own limitations.
Bibliography Master
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