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Thematic Cluster: Tracing Out Scalable Landscapes: Interpretative Layers About Plantation Designs

Tracing out scalable landscapes: interpretative layers over plantation designs

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In the last century, the intensification of a global economy based on commodities (ores, grains, sugar, cotton, meat) has set in motion a series of changes in landscapes, especially those of the global and political South. Taking soybeans as an example, its plantations stand out for covering huge areas, with almost 40 million kilometers cultivated in Brazil alone, and for having increased their global production from 27 million tons in 1960 to more than 400 million tons in the 2023 harvest. This sort of expansion brings with it broader arrangements that go beyond the moment of production, as its large-scale cultivation mode depends on well-defined infrastructures such as logistical corridors, railways, roads, and ports, in addition to energy production projects. These forms of production, circulation, and connection of commodities aim to establish scalable relationships between people, machines, seeds, plants, and with the land itself, tensioning binaries such as global-local and nature-culture.

Therefore, the consolidation of varied and interconnected global commodity chains invites us to carefully observe the emergence of new configurations and world designs, which are also literal: the aerial views of large monoculture plantations in Brazil, presented by different media outlets show us, almost regardless of the season, plants sprouting in parallel lines, machines crossing low to the ground and taking the harvest to railway lines and roads. We are facing scalable and replicable models, a construction of landscapes through technical dexterity ().

The infrastructure of modern mining, hydroelectric plants, industrial plants, and agribusinesses promotes this kind of “samefication” process, which intertwines more than human subjects/species, institutions, and artifacts. These ventures are built on the possibility of infinite expansion – of “scaling up” – without significantly transforming the frameworks of their original projects. This process is what in this cluster we understand as “scalability,” taking as reference the works of Anna Tsing (Citation2012, Citation2015, Citation2019). Found in science, business, precision design, as well as in modern ideals of progress and development, scalability requires that the elements of a project remain oblivious to the indeterminacies of difference, so that it can expand without changing. Thus, scalability is the quality that eliminates meaningful diversity, homogenizing and replicating only certain world designs. Although the mentioned contexts of commodity production are exemplary of this phenomenon, they do not exhaust what we understand, again following Anna Tsing, as a “plantation ecology:” the ways of simplifying, organizing, and controlling spaces, aiming for replicability and the standardization of processes, relationships, and landscapes. As Tsing has argued,

European colonial plantation (…) crafted self-contained, interchangeable project elements, as follows: exterminate local people and plants; prepare now-empty, unclaimed land; and bring in exotic and isolated labor and crops for production. This landscape model of scalability became an inspiration for later industrialization and modernization. (Tsing Citation2015, 39)

In this vein, the articles that make up this cluster help us to answer some key questions regarding the persistence of a plantation ecology and its scalable projects in contemporary times: How are technoscientific knowledge and bureaucracy entangled in the development of scalable projects and (re)production of landscapes? What are the frictions, alliances, and negotiations between the different ways of designing and inhabiting worlds? How can we consider the role of infrastructures in the processes of transforming (or maintaining) landscapes? In the next section, we characterize the idea of plantation in dialogue with STS (Science and Technology Studies), indicating the analytical gains of approaching this category when the process of changing landscapes is being debated. Next, we discuss how a plantation ecology operates in order to create a terra nullius, that is, a land without entangled meaningful relationships, though encountering processes of resistance. The paper ends with a summary of the contributions to this cluster.

1. Enduring plantations

With the advent of climate change and other ecological imbalances on a planetary scale that occur as a result of human action, discussions about the Anthropocene – the era in which humans become a geological force – have led to critical debates on scientific practice (Crutzen and Stoermer Citation2000; Steffen et al. Citation2011). Although climate issues have been a topic of research in different disciplines since the end of the nineteenth century, with the emergence of this subject as a public agenda and, especially, with the perspective of the Anthropocene, the boundaries between established disciplinary fields are blurred. Gradually, ecology or geology alone becomes insufficient to provide appropriate interpretative frameworks for the complexity we are experiencing.

Thus, within the interdisciplinary scope of STS, several authors have postulated that climate change and the Anthropocene do not only offer new themes to be addressed, but rather require methodological and, ultimately, epistemological innovations. In this regard, the most recent works by Bruno Latour (Citation2017, Citation2018) stand out, stressing that the climate issue is not an atypical moment – as the idea of a “crisis” brings with it – but rather a twist, a shift that requires repositioning relationships. It is also in this sense that Isabelle Stengers (Citation2015) emphasizes the coevality between technical knowledge, expressed in climate models, and other ways of knowing, such as those of forest peoples. Latour and Stengers, then, converge in their invocation of Gaia to renew criticisms of the nature-culture partition, betting on coevality and ways of co-constituting worlds (Danowski, Viveiros de Castro, and Latour Citation2014).

More than a reinterpretation of subject matters, the encounter between climate issues and STS poses a methodological challenge: How do we tell stories in the Anthropocene? Some dilemmas and challenges for conducting research on this topic are persistent, such as the movement between analytical scales, theoretical-empirical articulations, access to data, and the relationships established with research interlocutors. The reflections brought by Tsing (Citation2019) on how we can occupy and inhabit the ruins left by Anthropocene projects are important here. As the author shows drawing from the worlds of multispecies relationships established by matsutake mushrooms, we need to listen and tell stories of contaminated diversities and of the indeterminacies of meaningful encounters – this is a methodological task that is well aligned with the ethnographic enterprise. Therefore, it is significant that all the articles that make up this cluster are the result of ethnographic journeys. As these articles show, climate change can be understood in terms of large models debated in global arenas of scientific controversy, but also through the descriptions of changing water regimes and situated analyses made by riverside dwellers in the Amazon (Radaelli and Menin).

Although the ways of approaching issues specific to this time, in which landscapes are planned, controlled, and modified on different scales, are an ongoing debate, some perspectives and categories can be useful for reflection. In this sense, the discussion regarding the pitfalls and possibilities of the Anthropocene, promoted among scientists from different areas by the University of Aarhus in 2014 and later published in the journal Etnos, proved to be seminal in bringing an old image to the surface: plantations. As these scholars recalled on that occasion, since the sixteenth century plantations have become great devices for rearranging the lives of different species on a planetary scale, something that was unprecedented until then. Across the world, long-distance simplifications of very diverse landscapes and ways of life were promoted by colonial and contemporary plantations (Haraway et al. Citation2016; Ishikawa and Soda Citation2019; Tsing Citation2019).

Historical plantation systems, not only with their economic, but also political and sociocultural effects, have been extensively studied in the social sciences (Beckford Citation1972; Garcia, Heredia, and Garcia Citation1978; Guerra y Sánchez Citation1964; Heredia Citation1989; Leite Lopes Citation1978; Mintz Citation1986; Palmeira [Citation1977] Citation2009; Stoler Citation1995; Taussig Citation1980; Thompson Citation1931; Wagley Citation1960; Wolf and Mintz Citation1957). As Wolf (Citation1982) described, established for the large-scale production of one or two commodities, the first colonial plantations constituted de facto factories in the field. These were disciplined and capitalized corporations, in which organizational control, processing, storage, and production factors (including labor) were determined by the internationalized market. Wolf reminds us that plantation goods are commodities precisely because they can be compared and exchanged without reference to the social matrix in which they were produced, allowing the expansion of their standardized production, as well as their movement through distant and diverse locations.

Similarly, Mintz (Citation2008) asserts that the plantation's social order was an artifact for the expansion and development of outward-facing agricultural commodity production, through which “extremely distant cultures and communities have changed and come together in a growing network around the world” (Mintz Citation2008, 128). Thus, plantation economies generated an instance of early and emerging modernity in the tropics (even before the European Industrial Revolution), not only because of their technological apparatus, but also due to the circumstances of the encounter that created the first commodities of capitalism (Mintz Citation1986). According to Li and Semedi (Citation2021), the contemporary expansion of corporate plantations is no less global, and its scale is unprecedented: since 2000, plantation-based sugar production has expanded massively in Brazil; in Indonesia and Malaysia, millions of hectares of forest and mixed farmland have been cleared by corporations to grow palm.

These contemporary plantations, like those of the past, seek to interrupt the indeterminacy of human and other-than-human trajectories in singular landscapes, aiming for total control of plants, crops, and other interspecies relationships not foreseen in their model (Tsing Citation2019). Thus, the plantation ecology can only operate while eliminating diversity and contamination, and it does so by reducing the possibilities of human ways of life (whether by regulating forms of work, disciplining bodies, or interdicting unwanted habitability) and other-than-human sociability (through manipulation and extermination of fungi, “weed” plants, “pest” insects, etc.). In this way, these projects seek to avoid any and all disturbances inherent to life, and to achieve size, geographic, and administrative scalability.

Because scalability is achieved, and is not an attribute of nature, in a “plantation,” science, expertise, and administration operate in a coordinated way to control indeterminacies. As Haraway (Citation2015) argues, plantation is a “cognitive technology,” intertwined with the very form of production of modern scientific knowledge through the rationality of Cartesian thought. It is in this sense that Haraway proposes, in debate with Tsing and other scientists, that we have been living under the Plantationocene era:

[T]he plantation system predates both the terms Anthropocene and Capitalocene. The Plantationocene makes one pay attention to the historical relocations of the substances of living and dying around the Earth as a necessary prerequisite to their extraction (…) It is no accident that labour is brought in from elsewhere, even if, in principle, there is local labour available. Because it is more efficient in the logic of the plantation system to exterminate the local labour and bring in labour from elsewhere. The plantation system depends on the relocation of the generative units: plants, animals, microbes, people. The systematic practice of relocation for extraction is necessary to the plantation system. This began prior to the mid-eighteenth century story of fossil fuels and steam engines and industrial revolution and so on and so forth. (Haraway et al. Citation2016, 557)

The Plantationocene highlights the ongoing changes and persistence of the logic and materiality generated through plantations, recognizing the importance of their socio-spatial history as an analytical tool for understanding contemporary political, technical, and ecological processes. Among the central points raised by the Plantationocene is the recognition that the planetary transformations allocated within the Anthropocene framework are not effects of a “human species,” considered in a generic way, over a planet also understood as a homogeneous space. Such transformations are developments of a certain conception of Man created by the Enlightenment, in its desire for emancipation in relation to nature through a techno-scientific rationality. Thus, the world of the Anthropocene is hegemonically a Western one, also white and male. Furthermore, looking at the expansion of plantation-type projects on a global scale allows us to understand how different territories, peoples, beings, and bodies became entangled in these processes that are intertwined with the history of capitalism.

2. Plantation: landscape making machine

The world of the Plantationocene previously discussed is a world that emphasizes a singular and scalable way of existence. In regard to this understanding, plantation is not an abstract category, but a way of constructing, managing, and controlling landscapes. In this way, the plantation ecology highlights the intertwined relationships between bureaucracy and technical expertise, mobilizing knowledge from administration and modern science. These compositions can be seen, for example, in the processes of implementing corporate plantations, hydroelectric dams, and mining plants, since they require an effort to build landscapes while demanding the displacement of everything that is there.

Modernity is, among other things, the triumph of technical prowess over nature. This triumph requires that nature be cleansed of transformative social relations; otherwise it cannot be the raw material of techne. The plantation shows how: one must create terra nullius, nature without entangling claims. Native entanglements, human and not human, must be extinguished; remaking the landscape is a way to get rid of them. (Tsing Citation2012, 513)

In a similar vein, Latour, in conversation with Tsing and Stengers (Latour et al. Citation2018), points out that the notion of Plantationocene is productive because it allows us to reflect on a historical form of “appropriation of the land as if the land were not there,” a “de-soilization” of the Earth. We can observe this work of “de-soilization” carried out by the plantation ecology, for example, in the expanding frontiers of agribusiness in the Brazilian Cerrado and Amazon, also in the plantations of Indonesia, among other Asian, Eastern European, and Latin American countries – the Global South. Furthermore, it involves the design of a globally connected infrastructure, eclipsing unique, diverse, and unstable elements in a landscape. Among these infrastructures, artifacts, and techniques, there are embankments, no-till farming, diversion of waterways, irrigation channels, sowing machines, harvesters, aerial spraying of agrochemicals, railway tracks, highways that cross countries, and increasingly larger ports that sustain global commodity chains and are reproduced in different contexts.

Moreover, those connections are expressed in the designs of logistics corridors: spaces that will integrate a wide range of enterprises (railways, highways, ports, pipelines, hydroelectric dams, monoculture farms, and mineral extraction sites) to unlock capital flows and circulate commodities. Therefore, when we mention the plantation ecology in this thematic cluster, we also want to experiment with the idea that what is at stake in this global landscape is not just how to produce and explore, but also how to transport and bring together different elements. This is what we observe in the Nacala Logistics Corridor, where railways cross northern Mozambique carrying iron ore to the largest deep-water port on the entire east coast of Africa, bringing with them the promise of large-scale agricultural production and financial investments, as discussed by Perin in this volume. In these contexts where expansion is the main objective, planning and precision are required: the proliferation of controlled landscapes is what drives entrepreneurs, states, machines, and other technologies, as well as modern science itself.

Scalability then is this design feature that allows the expansion of an originally situated model, sublimating contingencies and the constitutive diversity of a territory. Otherwise, the literature reminds us that landscapes are always historical. This does not mean that places are structurally determined by their trajectories, but rather it is a recognition of the interactions that make up and transform specific territories. These interactions, it should be emphasized, are not just about human relationships, they are also about the arrangements between human life and the land itself: multi-species entanglements that are provisional and unpredictable. It is this unpredictability constitutive of the landscapes that scalability aims to eliminate or, at the very least, reduce to calculated risks and damage. To this end, technical knowledge is mobilized to repress relationships and simplify the space.

This process occurs very clearly in contexts of expanding land exploitation, but can also be seen in environmental conservation movements, such as those described by Dalla Costa, Santos, and Koch in this cluster. Therefore, the proliferation of scalable landscapes is not a process of univocal interests, but a way of designing a desirable world that specifies the type of relationships that must be preserved – and those that will not. This cluster highlights the diversity of contexts in which natural resources and human labor are exploited to homogenizing ends, as well as the effects of plantation infrastructures in a commodified world. So too, the homogenization of environmental preservation models must also be kept in mind as a “samefication” process of diversity.

Tim Ingold’s work (Citation2007) invites us to reflect on the increasing linearity of designs of which the plantation is once again an example, especially when we understand it as a kind of “landscape machine.” Large plantations are organized precisely along straight lines, which allows for mechanized planting, fertilizing, and harvesting while avoiding waste; just as the road network (railways, highways) that connects the products to the port guides and restricts movement and flow. In other words, the plantation is an artifact that produces “world designs,” which suggests a prolific approach to the field of STS. What technical objects, forms of measurement, and documents are needed for these designs? What kind of knowledge is encapsulated in these artifacts? What disputes and controversies are present in these contexts of landscape design and control?

Stemming from different ethnographic contexts, the papers in this cluster provide clues for answering some of these questions. Perin offers us a careful description of the movements and arrangements that set up an agricultural development project in Mozambique, ProSAVANA. In her analysis, the author emphasizes three elements that were widely mobilized to support the desire to modify the landscape: parallels, chains, and corridors. Dalla Costa, Flores dos Santos, and Koch identify the landscape changes faced by quilombola populations inhabiting the Alto Trombetas territories in the Brazilian Amazon. The authors shrewdly interpret the ways in which technical knowledge and bureaucracy become one in a way that categorizes the territory, simplifying the constitutive diversity of the landscape and the ways of inhabiting it.

These authors follow Tsing (Citation2019) in arguing that the scalability of a plantation ecology lies in the way their design blocks our perceptions of heterogeneity in the world, naturalizing expansion as the only path for development. In this sense, paying attention to scalability comes close to Escobar’s (Citation2017) propositions, when he invites us to assume global processes such as development as (world) designs that also say much about who produces them. That said, shared landscapes become part of “economies of scale,” which puts other forms of conceiving, designing, and inhabiting the world into dispute. As we will present in the next section, the main contributions of this cluster are interpretations of the layers, disputes, and controversies that arise from these landscape homogenization projects.

3. Resistance and contamination: contributions from the cluster

The expansion of plantation designs, anchored in techno-scientific knowledge, does not take place on terra nullius, as it often clashes with other configurations of the world that are based on other forms of knowledge. The arrival of plantations on new frontiers brings with it not only the promised progress, development, or modernization, but also population displacement, diversion of water courses, concentration of land and resources, and environmental degradation. Thus, the landscapes standardized and reiterated by the plantation ecology obliterate modes of existence based on other compositions of the world, threatening the lives of peasants, riverside dwellers, indigenous peoples, quilombolas, and other communities. However, contrary to what development projects do with their designs of pre-figured paths, what many of the “target communities” of these interventions show us are designs that shape environments for life, evoking new, creative, mutable entanglements (Ingold Citation2014). In these terms, we highlight that designing a desirable landscape or expanding the scale of a profitable design is not an innocuous process, as it involves establishing new relationships, whether of resistance, dispute, alliance, or negotiation.

Wendy Wolford (Citation2021) uses the expansion of agrarian practices in the luso-tropics to question the Plantationocene, drawing attention to the form of social organization (based on inequality) and relationship with the land (anchored in extractivism) that the contemporary plantation establishes, always under the egis of progress. However, the author emphasizes that plantations, including colonial ones, always inspire resistance. In accordance with Wolford, we believe that by looking at the movements of resistance to the impositions and designs of the plantation, it is possible to put a strain on the scalability of this project of modernity. Furthermore, as Crosby (Citation2004) states, not only do human bodies (often racialized) produce resistance, denounce, and subvert the violent norms established by the plantation, but also objects and other forms of life threaten its expansion: seeds that circulate ignoring the boundaries of the plantation; diseases, fungi, and viruses that emerge despite the standardization of agricultural processes and compromise the simplification of the landscape.

As Ferdinand (Citation2021) points out, the notion of a Plantationocene reestablishes the historicity of global environmental change without erasing the colonial and slave-based foundations of globalization, as well as its unequal ecological, metabolic, and material exchanges. More than commercial exchanges, the Plantationocene designates the era in which we observe the continuity of plantation logics driving public institutions, universities, consumption patterns, and ways of thinking about the world. Nonetheless, plantation forms, techniques, and means of producing worlds are no longer the same: “Beyond agriculture, plantations also take the form of industries that extract the rare minerals that are found in computers and mobile phones and of the terrestrial and marine ‘plantations’ of oil wells” (Ferdinand Citation2021, 47).

Similarly, McKittrick (Citation2011, Citation2013) shows in her work how the main characteristic of the unequal colonial-racial economy of plantations was the production of “non-places.” This dynamic is replicated in the increasing rate of incarceration of black people and the degradation of certain urban spaces located in landscapes once marked by colonial plantation systems. Researchers such as Davis et al. (Citation2019), Murphy and Schroering (Citation2020), and Jegathesan (Citation2021) draw attention to the limitations and traps that the Plantationocene concept can promote if we start from a “flattened” multi-species approach, which eclipses the deep hierarchies and inequalities intrinsic to the plantation and its current developments. Thus, emphasizing multi-species assemblages should not override reflection on the incorporated/embodied politics of the plantation and its socio-ecological hierarchies. One of the risks of a multi-species flattening through the concept of the Plantationocene is the obscuring of the struggles, resistance, and possibilities of transformation created by humans and other-than-humans (Ofstehage Citation2021). The papers in this cluster show that these processes of landscape simplification inherent to the plantation do not occur without the presence of those who are incorporated and affected by them, which is expressed in different forms of struggles and alliances.

Presenting the relational, ontological, and ambivalent character of infrastructures, the article written by Radaelli and Menin shows how infrastructures become entangled with the rivers and streams that make up the landscape and riverside life of the communities in Tumbira and Lago do Catalão, located in the Brazilian Amazon. On the one hand, the authors detail how the relationship between the riverside communities and gas pipelines, hydroelectric plants, energy transmission lines, cargo ships, and roadways are elements that produce affections permeated by fears, anxieties, and mistrust. On the other hand, the ambiguous dimension of desire related to the promises of modernity brought by infrastructure, such as access to electricity, also emerges in the accounts of the members of these communities.

The ambiguity of the designs of a plantation ecology also marks the relationship between the quilombola communities of Alto Rio Trombetas 1 and 2, in the Brazilian state of Pará, and the bureaucratic state apparatus, presented by Dalla Costa, Flores dos Santos, and Koch. As the authors point out, the overlaps in a web of government bodies, norms, and a discourse favorable to progress and profit, led the communities to organize in two converging fronts: one against the invasions of their lands and limitations imposed on their ways of life by bauxite mining enterprises, and another in favor of public policies to create environmental conservation units. These are struggles that remain in their traditionally occupied territories, to have their rights recognized and to maintain their biodiverse practices, which update the forms of aquilombamento against the plantation.

In the case of the controversies surrounding the international cooperation program ProSAVANA, and the world designs of the agribusiness production that it sought to bring to the landscapes of northern Mozambique, Perin’s ethnographic work also shows how a series of struggles are intertwined with this plantation ecology. These are struggles that take place on different scales and involve meaningful relationships between different actors – peasants, social movements, technicians, and scientists – who in different ways have made the recomposition of ProSAVANA’s scalable project possible, just as much as the territories on which its development proposals were focused have also shifted.

It is worth noting that in the articles that make up the cluster, the subjects’ relationship with the land, a central element of the landscape, is fundamental for them to build meaningful relationships that allow them to confront the plantation models. In this sense, the relationship between plot and plantation elucidated by Silvia Wynter (Citation1971), which is recovered in more than one of the papers, shows us how resistance to these scalable projects can also be done from “inside” the spaces in which these models operate.

As final remarks, we would like to emphasize the relevance of the debate on the plantation futures (McKittrick Citation2013) in the Latin American context, where historical plantations were first established and still persist, though it can also significantly include other postcolonial contexts, such as countries in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. It is no coincidence that the works that make up this cluster are based on empirical studies carried out in different contexts of the global and political South, especially in Brazil, which in recent years has faced a collapse of its environmental policies, coupled with the predatory advance of mining and agribusiness that threatens the livelihoods of indigenous peoples and traditional populations. Questioning the plantation therefore involves unveiling the arrangements that drive it, pointing out the associations between institutionalized political power, legal instruments, extractive enterprises, and old and new elites.

In the recent Brazilian context, not only have the instruments and authorities for land and environmental control been weakened, but the State itself started to encourage forms of occupation and exploitation of the land – and of those who live on it – that are speculative and deliberately distant from established legislation on environmental conservation and human rights. Exemplary of this phenomenon is a meeting held in April 2020 (the recording of which was publicized by the mediaFootnote1) in which Brazil’s Minister of the Environment suggested that the government should take advantage of the fact that the attention of the press and citizens was focused on the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic to “pass the herd,” that is, change environmental and agricultural legislation in order to benefit a predatory production model. The damaging effects of these worldviews which suppress diversity can be seen, for example, in the tragedy of the Yanomami people,Footnote2 whose territory was invaded by predatory mining. Although localized, this scandalous Brazilian situation highlights not only the persistence but also the recent expansion of plantation policies, as well as the perversity of the mechanisms that make them scalable.

The contributions to this cluster are representative of the analytical gains that looking closely at the practices contained in technical and bureaucratic objects offers for reflecting on processes of landscape alteration. Beyond denunciations and critical descriptions of the pressures that peoples and territories suffer as a result of an ideal of expansion, unveiling the contradictions of the plantation ecology is an interpretative and political contribution to STS, especially in the global and political South. Claiming diversity and showing the multiple relationships that make up the world are also ways of escaping the simplification of landscapes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ângela Camana

Ângela Camana holds a PhD in Sociology from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Anthropology, where she works on the CONTER Project (Land conflicts on fronts of expansion [Brazilian Amazonia]: violence, expulsions and political domination), funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-21-CE41-0021), developing research on the intricate relationships between technical objects, scientific knowledge, and bureaucracy in the expansion of the agricultural frontier.

Vanessa P. Perin

Vanessa P. Perin holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of São Carlos – São Paulo (Brazil), developing research on the soybean supply chain and its techno-financial mechanisms for the continued expansion of the agricultural frontier through agribusiness. She holds a research grant from the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo - FAPESP (2021/06354-5; 2022/14155-5)

Notes

References

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