This morning I heard a remarkable keynote address by Tomislav Longinovic. For a year, my colleagues have been hosting a seminar entitled CrossRoads: Culture, Politics and Belief in the Balkans and South Asia. Much as I would have loved to attend every session, I somehow managed to go to, yes, two: the first keynote on India and one of the last, today. The experience was enhanced by the fact that I've known Toma for about a quarter century: he was hired at the University of Wisconsin about the time that Yugoslavia was becoming engulfed in the wars that tore it to pieces, and I was still in graduate school. But the warm embrace I got at the end of the talk was only half the reason I had a fabulous morning; the other half was the talk itself. "Words that Hide: Balkan Politics of Translation" was his title, and his aim was to try and tweak our understanding of the Balkans and of the unfortunate term "Balkanization," which, as he pointed out, is always negat...
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