Few would disagree that ideology is a loaded term. Some who see the title of this special issue may toss it aside as a waste. Others may reach gladly for it, thinking “At last the Review has seen the light.” I don't think either reaction will prove justified based on my reading of the papers here. What you will find in these pages is a careful attempt to identify and demonstrate both the potential in and confusion surrounding this gadfly of a word.

Ideology is a difficult term to discipline. That is one of the things members of the Amherst Seminar learned when editing this collection during the last year. Our call for papers was our first concession to the difficulty of disciplining that term. The call for papers suggested ideology might be used to refer to (1) false consciousness associated with and produced by particular structures of domination; (2) systems of belief of a group or class; (3) coherent meanings encoded in social relations and institutions; (4) consciousness linked to material conditions; (5) contested areas of social life as opposed to those that are taken for granted; and (6) the processes by which meanings and ideas are produced. Not surprisingly, the call generated a broad range and a large number of responses.

Two categories of Muslim legal texts are utilized in Yemen. In the methodological literature I examine conceptions of common sense and consensus, and the relation of knowledge and ignorance. In the applied literature, I review egalitarian and hierarchical themes. The hegemonic qualities of such texts derive from their appropriation of ordinary wisdom and from the shifting polyvocality of the texts themselves.

This study compares the language in which South African and United States law represents the histories of indigenous peoples. South African political and legal language has linked denial of indigenous peoples' history with denial of rights to property. The language of the law in the United States recognizes prior history and prior possessory claims to land, although in the past this recognition did not stop the decimation of Native Americans. The contrast between the uses of history in the laws of two nations reveals how ideologies, language, and the law are intertwined in the determination of indigenous peoples' property rights.

This article explores the connections between the interpretive and comparative dimensions of ideology by analyzing ethnographic data from an American town. The town is undergoing a rapid process of urbanization, and townspeople are absorbed in the analysis of the changes around them and their town's prospects as a community. The article compares interview data and courtroom observations in which local understandings are shown to be constituted in pervasive cultural distinctions: past and future, insiders and outsiders, harmony and conflict, gender, and various forms of family life shape local views of change and conflict. The conclusion relates an analysis of the symbolic terms in which these distinctions are expressed to general issues of the nature of ideologies and their truth claims.

Through an analysis of the structure of the community mediation movement in the United States and an ethnography of the practices of mediators in local programs, this paper examines how community mediation is made, and how it is ideologically constituted. The ideology of community mediation is produced through an interplay among three ideological projects or visions of community mediation and organizational models, and by the selection and differential use of mediators to handle cases. We argue that ideologies are formed through the mobilization of symbolic resources by groups promoting different projects. Central to the production of mediation ideology is a struggle over the symbolic resources of community justice and consensual justice. Although various groups propose differing conceptions of community justice, they share a similar commitment to consensual justice, and this similarity is produced through reinterpretations of the same symbols. The ambiguities in community mediation are, it appears, being overtaken by consensus on the nature of the mediation process itself.

Drawing on C. Wright Mills' analysis of vocabularies of motive, this paper examines the ways lawyers and clients interpret and give meaning to the social behavior involved in the legal process of divorce. Based on observation of 115 law office conferences, the paper describes discussions between lawyers and clients concerning marriage failure, problems in the legal process, and planning strategy. It shows how lawyers and clients bring different agendas and views of the social world to these conversations. Those differences are considered part of the context for understanding the way professional authority is exercised and resisted. Clients reconstruct the past and explain their own behavior as well as the actions of their spouses. Lawyers avoid being drawn into that reconstruction. Their interpretive work explains the way the divorce process works and how it shapes the actions of divorcing spouses. The paper analyzes the predicaments created by these interpretations of reality and the consequences that flow from them.

Over the last century there has been significant growth within our society of practices that distribute costs and benefits to individuals based on statistical knowledge about the population. These actuarial practices like insurance premium setting and standardized testing in educational admissions are successful largely because they allow power to be exercised more effectively and at lower political cost. At the same time they generate ideological effects which have the potential to transform the way individuals understand themselves and their groups. In a 1977 case, Los Angeles Water and Power v. Manhart (435 U.S. 702), the United States Supreme Court considered a challenge to the actuarial use of gender in setting employee benefits. The case and the debates it generated illuminate the danger posed by the ideological effects of actuarial practices to our political culture in general, and to traditionally disempowered classes such as women in particular. At the same time it illustrates the limitation of traditional legal rights discourse as a means of resisting these dangers.

This article reconstructs Marx's approaches to the critique of the public/private distinction in law and analyzes contemporary approaches to public/private distinctions in legal studies. Specifically, I focus on three approaches to critiquing the public/private distinction as legal ideology. These approaches are identified in works by Balbus, Klare, and Kennedy. They have affinities with Marx's analyses and demonstrate the incoherence, mystification, and consequences of public/private distinctions in legal discourse and practice. The article demonstrates that the ideological critique of the public/private distinction is characterized by alternative methods and substantive issues. These approaches, I argue, differ because they are concerned with distinctive objectives of inquiry, different arenas of social action, and have distinct purposes.