At his death, he was mourned as “an inspired teacher and an unsurpassed mentor,” and a “pioneer in the anthropology of emotion.”[2] Lindholm was born in 1946 in Mankato, Minnesota, the son of a civil servant.
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.
[5] 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.
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.
The use of multidisciplinary approaches applied to case studies was followed again in Culture and Authenticity (2007), where the contemporary quest for “the really real” was explored in the realms of art, cuisine, dance, adventure, nationalism, ethnicity, and other collective and personal arenas.
[12] Extending this line of thought, another book (The Struggle for the World [2010]) compared modern utopian “aurora movements” ranging from the leftist Zapatistas and rightist supporters of Le Pen to New Age ravers and Slow Food activists.
[13] In sum, Lindholm's research, though often built upon exotic or extreme material, always aims to bring anthropological insight into the existential dilemmas of modern life, where “all that is solid melts into air.