Sacral Logics & Datafied Bodies: Ritual, Interoperability, and Moral Authority in the Electronic Health Record

Electronic health records (EHRs) are typically understood as technical infrastructures for storing and transmitting clinical information. This paper argues that the clinical record also operates as a ritual technology that produces what might be called the datafied body—a structured moral and epistemic object that organizes care, authority, and decision-making within contemporary medicine. Drawing on ritual theory and science and technology studies (STS), I examine documentation practices, interoperability protocols, and data standardization as ritualized performances that transform embodied patients into portable informational forms. These practices do more than record clinical reality; they establish what counts as legitimate knowledge, stabilize institutional hierarchies, and authorize particular forms of intervention. By interpreting the electronic health record as a technoscientific ritual system, the paper illuminates the sacral logics through which data infrastructures generate moral authority in modern healthcare and demonstrates how technological mediation reshapes the religiously resonant categories through which bodies, care, and responsibility are understood.