Foodstuff placement in ibis mummies and the role of viscera in embalming

Recent excavation of a mummified ibis, in whose bill were found numerous snails, and the 2010 radiological study of ibis mummies from Yale's Peabody Museum drew attention to the presence of bird foodstuffs intentionally placed inside mummified ibises following evisceration. The foodstuff packing in the Peabody's ibises was likely contained within the birds' own viscera. Radiographs of a hatchling ibis mummy at McGill's Redpath Museum demonstrated similar placement of foodstuffs within the eviscerated body cavity. This pattern of ibis evisceration, with the previously unreported practice of foodstuff packing, suggests the provision of an afterlife food source to the bird. These findings lend support to the idea that the viscera of ibises, and humans alike, were meant to continue their living function in the afterlife. Given that organs of digestion and respiration were specifically preserved and retained within, or in conjunction with, human mummies, the implication is that animals were also treated with similar respect and care, and the crucial role of the viscera was recognised.     

Issues,Coalitions, and Divided Government

Ryan J. Barilleaux, The Post-Modern Presidency. The Office After Ronald Reagan. New York: Praeger. 1988. Pp. x, 175. $35.95.

Richard Rose, The Postmodern President: The White House Meets the World. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers. 1988. Pp. x, 350. $17.95.     

Interpretive walks: advancing the use of mobile methods in the study of entrepreneurial farm tourism settings

This article draws on the application of interpretive walks in a socio‐geographical study of tourism‐oriented entrepreneurial activity on multi‐generational family farms in New Zealand. We highlight the great potential this method holds for tourism researchers interested in the ways tourist spaces are produced in processes of place‐making. Mobile methods have been a feature of qualitative field research in several disciplines for some time, particularly in cultural geography with its emphasis on human interactions in and with landscapes. The interpretive walk, known also as the walking interview, has been applied mainly in urban neighbourhood, health, transport, and housing research, where it has proven very useful for revealing human connections to place that have been difficult to elicit using stationary face‐to‐face interviews. This article is one of the few that reports on the use of the method in a farm tourism setting. It is also one of few applied studies seeking to understand the local geographies of farm tourism and their connections to the farm site as both family home and place of primary production. The method is characterised as an effective tool for navigating and interpreting the socio‐spatial settings in which new rural tourism ventures emerge, evolve, and are embedded. The approach allows for unexpected encounters with spatial practices and strategies, projects, and objects, behind which lie stories of changing human relationships with the land, economy, and community, and of the exigencies of everyday life that are less readily unearthed using conventional interviews.     

Redivided Government and the Politics of the Budgetary Process in the Clinton Years: An Oral History Perspective

Paul Quirk and Bruce Nesmith argue that divided government may or may not be functional, depending mostly on the type of policy that dominates the legislative agenda. In this article, I draw on the University of Virginia Miller Center's oral history of Bill Clinton's tenure as president to review budgetary politics in the 1990s, during which divided government prevailed for all but two years. I conclude that in addition to type of policy, political circumstances help to determine whether divided government produces stalemate or compromise. Conflict between the parties led to budgetary stalemate in 1995–1996, cooperation in the form of the Balanced Budget Act in 1996–1997, and stalemate again beginning in January 1998.     

Thou With Me: A Study in the Structure of Psalm 23

Psalm 23 is one of the most widely beloved and commonly quoted poems in the corpus of biblical literature. Recently, this psalm has come under scrutiny, particularly from James Kugel, for its apparent lack of adherence to theoretical rules of Hebrew poetics. This study presents a thor-ough examination of Psalm 23 in order to establish its versification and poetic principles. This paper first addresses stichometry, establishing a working hy-pothesis of the psalm’s lines and cola, and the poet’s guiding principles of sti-chometry. The study then discusses versification, exploring thematic and sty-listic units which demonstrate the division of Psalm 23 into strophes. Finally, based on the established stichometry and versification, this paper will look at the poem’s macrostructure, its internal logic, and how these are used to create a central theme and coherent narrative.