Donald S. Moore was a member of the faculty in the Department of Anthropology from 1998 until his reluctant retirement, due to health issues, in 2019. As Professor Emeritus, Don remained a dedicated mentor to many graduate students, literally until the very end of his life. Don was a brilliant scholar of many things, including colonial and post-colonial regimes of land and agrarian livelihoods in Zimbabwe; he also had a keen interest in race and property relations in post-apartheid South Africa. Don’s books, Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe (Duke University Press, 2005) and the volume Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference, co-edited with Jake Kosek and Anand Pandian (Duke University Press, 2003) have been immensely influential in anthropology, geography, African studies, political ecology, post-colonial studies, and environmental studies, to name only a few of the many disciplines on which he has had an enduring impact.
Well beyond the traction of his written work, though, Don will remain best known as a tireless mentor, friend, teacher, and interlocutor to generations of colleagues, students, and affines, far and wide. He was a scholar in the deepest sense of the word. He brought his immersion in an always-expanding, revolutionary, anti-colonial, and anti-racist archive of thought into the substance and ethical orientation of his everyday encounters and conversations. Any visit with Don, whether in his office on the third floor of AAPB, at his home, or via email or text, meant the pleasure of being immersed with him in ideas and in a vast expanse of relations – not just because you were surrounded by the most extensive book collection imaginable, but because you were enveloped in the webs of connection that only Don could weave through ideas, people, work, music, films, and deep genealogies of thought and of care. He was wickedly funny and uncannily well-read, a true listener and an unfailingly generous soul. We will miss him terribly.