Engaging the field through retrospective methods: a Cambodian story

Abstract

This paper illustrates how sport may be associated with community development and peace building when marshalled by committed and influential local individuals. However, in keeping with the main theme of this special issue, the thrust of the paper is as methodological as it is substantive. Our beginning point is the argument that while innovative in many respects, the ‘sport, social development and peace’ (SDP) literature has been rather limited methodologically speaking. Paradoxically for a social arena that so obviously depends on the prolonged stewardship of key individuals, a life history or ‘storied’ approach has rarely been undertaken. In this paper, we attempt to redress this methodological imbalance by making a case for the potential usefulness of such ‘recall methods’ and, specifically, by both ‘chronologizing’ and ‘narrativizing’ the life of a man who has been central in promoting sport as a vehicle for community development in one of the most economically and politically challenged of all Southeast Asian countries – Cambodia. Thus, by arguing that life history approaches have the potential to make a meaningful contribution to knowledge and understanding, this paper engages and hopefully advances the methodological debate in the SDP literature.

Keywords:

• Cambodia
• life history analysis
• chronology
• narrative
• sport, social development and peace

Notes

1. As noted in the paper, the authors have collaborated with Mr. Ouk Sareth since 1998. As such, we have continuously interviewed him and collected what has become by now a substantial narrative/data ‘yield’ since that time. One of our associated long-term tasks has thus been to work with, organise and prioritise often scattered responses and comments so that, in the end, they produce a logical and coherent flow regarding Sareth’s recollections, and thus his life history. Qualitative researchers Berg and Lune (2012) poignantly refer to this critical fieldworker labour as ‘sorting the noodles from the soup.’ Sareth’s chronology is presented in this paper but, since they are intrinsic elements of this long-term chronological account, some elements of this chronology also appear in Okada (2012) and Okada and Young (2011). However, while both of the latter sources use data up to approximately 2010, the current paper, by contrast, simultaneously relies on both earlier phases of Sareth’s various ‘storied’ accounts and far more recent ones (such as data gathered from our meetings in Phnom Penh in 2016) in order to re-shape this story as an original life history account.