Moving to the Center of the Earth

This article inquires how specific bodily movements, such as kneeling, crawling, bowing, and other forms of approach-oriented, low-posture locomotion, produce religious experiences and spatial public manifestations of the sacred. To address this question, I present and theorize kinetic rituals: the directional and counted sequences of embodied movement elicited by site-specific architectural conditions. The analysis focuses on microchoreographies generated through scripted pilgrimages and devotional approaches to sacred centers. My formulation departs from Mauss’s “techniques of the body” (learned motor schemes), Bourdieu’s habitus (durable dispositions), Csordas’s embodiment (the body as existential ground or modality of attention), and Coleman’s accounts of pilgrimage mobility (circulation across networks). Instead, in what I term “kinetic rituals,” I make an analytic distinction between potentiality (i.e., the socially and materially charged capacities to move) and the kinetic emplacement (i.e., their actualization in mimetic, repetitive, directional motion that reactualizes sacred times in public centers). On the basis of a multisite ethnography at Catholic shrines, I show how architectural fittings and surfaces (carpeted knee paths, enumerations of steps, low portals, narrow stairs) render kinetics empirically legible and ritually efficacious. I describe how repetitive locomotion generates devotional attention, temporal blending, and spatial claims that link the sacred and profane registers in public spaces while simultaneously having political consequences, including the inscription of territorial claims. By identifying the kinetic ritual as a distinct mechanism, this article extends embodiment and mobility approaches and puts forward a movement-centered framework for analyzing how built form and disciplined motion together make the sacred experientially present in already secularized spaces.