Objective:A small-scale exploration of the use of video analysis to study robberies. We analyze the use of weapons as part of the body posturing of robbers as they attempt to attain dominance.Methods:Qualitative analyses of video footage of 23 shop robberies. We used Observer XT software (version 12) for fine-grained multimodal coding, capturing diverse bodily behavior by various actors simultaneously. We also constructed story lines to understand the robberies as hermeneutic whole cases.Results:Robbers attain dominance by using weapons that afford aggrandizing posturing and forward movements. Guns rather than knives seemed to fit more easily with such posturing. Also, victims were more likely to show minimizing postures when confronted with guns. Thus, guns, as part of aggrandizing posturing, offer more support to robbers’ claims to dominance in addition to their more lethal power. In the cases where resistance occurred, robbers either expressed insecure body movements or minimizing postures and related weapon usage or they failed to impose a robbery frame as the victims did not seem to comprehend the situation initially.Conclusions:Video analysis opens up a new perspective of how violent crime unfolds as sequences of bodily movements. We provide methodological recommendations and suggest a larger scale comparative project.
This interview with Jack Katz offers an inspiring statement about how to study social life. It starts with a discussion of Katz’s three-dimensional social ontology; social life is constituted in embodied interactions in which people adjust to others and create transcendent meanings. Contrasting the ontology with anthropology’s ontological turn, we note that social ontology is about generating empirically accurate descriptions capturing the flow of social life. This leads to a critical discussion of sociology’s pre-occupation with explanans-driven theorizing. Touching upon macro–micro relationships, we consider what a phenomenology of collective emotions would look like. This brings us to emotional transformations, notably the notion of ‘falling’, an important theme in Katz’s work. The interview continues with advice of how to think beyond given categories, to consider the validity of ethnographic description and to look for the absurd. Finally, we conclude that ethnography has the potential to appeal to mass audiences.
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