Charles Lindholm (born 1946) is the University Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. He is the author of nine books and over seventy articles and reviews. His writings have been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Chinese, Arabic, and Portuguese. Family, education and work history Lindholm was born in 1946 in Mankato, Minnesota, the son of a civil servant. He attended East Denver High School. After receiving his undergraduate degree from Columbia College in 1968 he spent the next several years traveling in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and the West Indies. He met his wife Cherry in Jamaica in 1972 and in 1973 won a scholarship to study Anthropology at Columbia. In 1977, Cherry and her daughter Michelle accompanied him on his fieldwork with the Swat Pukhtun in Northern Pakistan. He earned his doctorate in 1979 and taught at Columbia and Barnard until 1983. He then held a joint appointment in the Committee on Social Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Harvard, where he remained until 1990. Since then he has been the University Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. Research Lindholm’s research uses detailed case studies to extend, test, and integrate sociological and psychological theory. His first book, Generosity and Jealousy (1982) was based on his original research in Swat. In it, he argued that the constricted patrilineal social structure of Swati society, coupled with scarcity of resources, impelled its members toward relationships of rivalry and antagonism. However, this hostility was balanced by an ethic of ritualized hospitality and by an idealization of friendship. These were said to be symbolic and psychic manifestations of fundamental inclinations to attachment that were precluded by the objective circumstances of the larger system. His next book, Charisma (1990), synthesized a wide range of theory in order to construct a base for the study of idealization. This base was then applied to the Hitler movement, the Manson Family, the Jim Jones cult, and shamanistic religions. Among other things, the book showed that modern charismatic collectives are more compelling and encompassing, as well as more distorted and destructive, under contemporary circumstances of alienation than was the case in premodern social systems. He returned to this topic in the volume he edited in 2013 entitled The Anthropology of Religious Charisma: Ecstasies and Institutions. He also published several articles comparing the structure and experience of romantic love with that of charisma, arguing for a more culturally nuanced