“Who is a Gypsy?”

In its last section called Replikázás, Replika returns to its old tradition of securing space for important ongoing debates. Gábor Kertesi’s polemical essay is an answer to János Ladányi and Iván Szelényi’s article “Who Is a Gipsy?” (Kritika, 1997 December). Criticizing their central assumption, Kertesi argues that the “impossibility thesis”– the idea that it is impossible to estimate the size of the Gipsy population due to the large number of possible definitions – is valid in case of every scientific problem inadequately defined.