3. I should add here that Van Gogh’s death left me in quite an emotional state myself. Although Dutch politics and society had become increasingly polarised since 9/11 and the assassination of the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002, it was incomprehensible that ‘we’ had suddenly now reached a stage where artists and intellectuals had to fear for their lives. So, I went to the Linnaeusstraat as an anthropologist, but at the same time as a Dutch person, an Amsterdammer, an Amsterdam intellectual and a person from the neighbourhood.