‟Cikáni„ - rasa, nebo způsob života?

The paper analyzes the parliamentary debates and explanatory reports from the Czechoslovak National Assembly during the passing of the "Law on Traveling Gypsies" in 1927. The primary goal of the paper is to find out if the term "gypsy" was understood as a biological category (race) or a social one (mode of life characterized by traveling). At the same time, the analyzed texts are studied from the perspective of a thesis based on Foucault's Discipline and Punish and Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust. Were the ideas expressed in legislators' statements closer to the normalization power and discipline (Foucault) in which "gypsiness" was seen as a social fact, or to the gardening culture and categorical murder (Bauman) in which "gypsiness" was seen as a racial category? Finally, the paper analyzes the Czech and Slovak wartime decrees concerning Gypsies that were induced by Nazi racial theories. The article comes to the conclusion that both in the law and in decrees issued at the beginning of the war Gypsies were identified mainly through social indicators, not racial ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]