Tracing lines in the lawscape: Registration/pilgrimage and the sacred/secular of law/space

Abstract

The aim of this article is to draw upon sacred/secular ‘journeying’ to explore the inherent movement invoked by the state’s documentation of the life course. In tracing this motion, the article follows two intersecting pathways – the literal travel of those who register a life event and the figurative ‘journeying’ of legal identity. The argument develops from a case study conducted at the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge (Canterbury, UK): a museum, gallery, library, cafe, community exhibition, tourist information point and registration hub. But rather than using the building as a frame, to follow more closely the activity of registrars and citizens, I locate imaginative potential in the Beaney’s ‘tessellating’ spaces. Accordingly, the spatial account which is developed is ‘fictive’ in its very nature and offers an implicit critique of a bureaucratic act of governance embedded with legal fiction. In doing so, the article contributes to critical work on registration which deploys the language of ‘journeying’ to outline the performative force of state documentation, and more broadly, to spatial approaches which illustrate patterns of movement within the ‘lawscape’. The article argues that the ‘journeying’ of registration represents a pilgrimage, whereby individuals are ‘called’ to bureaucratic space at the centre of their local sphere, and the certificates they take with them, much like the badges of medieval pilgrims, are ‘takeaway tokens’ of the state – documents which impress legal identities upon us.