ABSTRACT
As I began to develop a better sense of what was transpiring, I changed the angle of inquiry to one that specifically probed this malleable space of memory. The new kinds of questions I asked aimed at bringing these transmuted memories to the surface in ways that rendered presumed collective and individual identities suddenly unclear. In subsequent attempts to find primary materials to develop my rather impressionistic field observations, I came to realize that these Kosovo-Albanians were nowhere to be found using certain kinds of tools while they were everywhere, once new kinds of questions were asked. Therefore, the easy answer to the question 'Where did the Albanians go?' is that they were always there. The problem lay in that they were never 'seen' by the state bureaucracies and (as the informants insisted over and over again) by Europeans themselves. The answer to the next obvious question 'Why were they never seen?' is composed of two inter-related parts: first, no one bothered to ask; second, Kosovo-Albanians never forced their 'hosts' to see them.
