Marie Alexandrine Martin

Marie-Alexandrine Martin (1932−2013), affectuously nicknamed Mam, was a linguist, botanist and ethnologist who, as a CNRS researcher (and later Director of the CNRS Research Center), conducted ethnobotanical, ethnolinguistic and sociological fieldword across Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s.

Between 1965 and 1972, she conducted ethnobotanical and ethnolinguistical fieldwork in the Cardamom mountains (Khmer and Pear villages) and also with Khmer and Pear (or Chong) people from Thailand. Her work as a botanist and ethnobotanist led her to study the Cambodian diet and nutrition patterns after the civil war.

In addition to her scholarly publications, including the reference study L’ethnobotanique du Cambodge, and Les Khmers daeum,“Khmers de l’origine” (PEFEO Paris, 1997), Marie Alexandrine Martin wrote an essay on post-war Cambodia, Le mal cambodgien (Paris: 1989), translated into Engish as Cambodia, A Shattered Society (1994). Several specialists of Cambodia’s modern history found the latter publication ​‘condescending’ and overcritical of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) after the eviction of the Khmer Rouge (1979), with an inclination to exaggerate the ​‘exactions’ of the Vietnamese occupying forces. Contrary to researcher Michael Vickery, she seemingly never went back to Cambodia after the war, collecting material for her book from Cambodian refugees in France and in the refugee camps at the Thailand-Cambodia border. [see for instance Judy L. Ledgerwood​’s review in Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1995), pp. 115 – 118.]

Publications [under construction]

• “Les Pear, cultivateurs-cueilleurs du Massif des Cardamomes (Cambodge)”, Études rurales, n°53 – 56, 1974. pp. 439 – 447.
• Le Mal cambodgien: Histoire d’une société traditionnelle face à ses leaders politiques 1946 – 1987, Paris, Hachette,1989, 304 p. | ENG Cambodia: A Shattered Society, tr. by Mark W. McLeod, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. |KH ជំងឺកម្ពុជា [The Khmer Disease], tr. by ទិឃា យុ [Youk Tikha], Phnom Penh, nd.
• “Les Khmers de Thailande: de l’isolement à l’assimilation”, in
• Les Khmers Daeum, ​“Khmers de l’origine” société montagnarde et exploitation de la forêt : de l’écologie à l’histoire, Paris, Presses de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient [Monographies n. 183], 1997, 514 p.

Photo: Marie Martin in an undated video capture shared by Ang Meng Hout in 2024. Mr Hout said Marie Martin visited Cambodia in 1991.]