Article begins
Namika Raby, lecturer emerita of anthropology at California State University, Long Beach, died on March 3, 2025, at the age of 78. Dr. Raby was born in Matara, Kotuwegoda, Sri Lanka, and was the eldest of four children. Although raised in a Muslim home where Tamil and Sinhala were spoken, Dr. Raby began her education at Bishops College in Columbo, a Catholic school, where English was the medium of instruction.
She later attended the University of Peradeniya and became an anthropology student during her freshman year after attending a lecture by Gananath Obeyesekere, the chair of the sociology department. In an article about her mentor and life-long friend, coauthored with Laleen Jayamanne shortly before her death, Dr. Raby notes that Professor Obeyesekere was not a typical lecturer; he was a theatrical presence in the classroom, who once explained the role of the sanni demon, a lowly figure in Sinhalese Buddhism, by hopping across the room with a banana on his toe. And it was the venerable Obeyesekere who later convinced Dr. Raby’s father to let her move to the US, where she worked closely with the British political anthropologist F. G. Bailey and earned a doctorate from the University of California at San Diego in 1978 for her study of Sri Lanka’s irrigation system. At UC San Diego, Professor Raby also met and married fellow graduate student George Scott (1948–2022), one of the first anthropologists to study the Hmong refugee population of California.
After receiving her PhD, Dr. Raby taught briefly at UCLA and UC San Diego before receiving a three-year fellowship at the International Water Management Institute in Sri Lanka. There she learned to apply her knowledge of bureaucratic systems to the solution of practical problems. This experience led to consultancies with the World Bank and the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and the evaluation of irrigation systems in the Philippines, Colombia, India, and Sri Lanka, research that always required working across academic disciplines, government agencies and cultural boundaries. Describing an early project in India in her last article, Dr. Raby blithely recalled “walking the 22km of the Indira Gandhi Canal in Rajasthan, with my team, in darkness and pouring rain with a Jat elder leading us with his torch made of palm leaves and chanting jai hind (Long Live India).”
Among South Asian scholars, Dr. Raby is well-known for Kachcheri Bureaucracy in Sri Lanka: The Culture and Politics of Accessibility, her analysis of the Sri Lankan water system (Syracuse University Press, 1985). In this work, Raby examined how local residents utilized informal channels and personal networks to navigate the bureaucratic system and gain access to the resources they needed.
In the early 2000s, Dr. Raby turned her attention to the politics of water in California, most notably the struggle over water rights in the rapidly changing Imperial Valley. In “Stella Mendoza: A Water Warrior in Imperial Valley, California” (2006), Raby not only describes the work of one grassroots activist who mobilized a low-income, rural community to resist a water transfer agreement that would send needed water to San Diego and leave 70,000 acres of Valley land fallow, but the central role played by women in the struggle for water rights globally.
In addition to her work at The World Bank and the FAO, Dr. Raby taught at CSULB for over a quarter century (1991–2018) before retiring as lecturer emerita in 2018. The courses she most enjoyed teaching were Modernization in Global Perspective and Culture and Communication. She also taught courses in the departments of Asian and Asian American Studies (AAAS) and history, as well as helping to coordinate programs for the Yadunandan Center for India Studies.
Dr. Raby is survived by her loving daughter, Leila Scott; her son-in-law, Travis Wilder; and their four-year-old son, Sea. She also leaves behind siblings and extended family members in California, Canada, and Sri Lanka.
(Ronald Loewe)