Asian beauty": representations of "Asianness" in the city space (on the case of the student contest "Miss and Mister Asia-2015" in Tomsk)

The article presents a rich description of the contest «Miss and Mister Asia - 2015», based on the material gathered through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with contest participants and organizers. The event was held at the Tomsk State University Concert Hall and the night club «Fakel». Participants represented various ethnic groups divided into «Russian» - the Buryats, Tuvinians, and Altaians - and «foreign» Asians - the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Mongolians - though this categorization was not introduced by the organizers of the contest. In our case study, we use the notion of «Asianness» assuming certain cultural values, traditions, and customs, as well as a certain anthropological type and the geographical location of corresponding republics and countries. The study relies on the work by Erving Goffman «The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life» and the notion of «performance» introduced by him. For a detailed and structured analysis of the discourse in question, we divided the object of our study into the inner and outer side of performance. The outer side includes main organizational issues and practicalities of the event, among which are the casting call, rehearsals, and the contest per se. The inner side encompasses individual emotions on the part of both participants and organizers and experiences that accompany each stage of the contest. The outer side of the event, as a rule, consists of a huge number of tasks to be solved by the organizers. As the contest has quite a long history - it has been carried out in Tomsk since 2004 - all its stages are well known to them and do not cause any difficulties. As for the inner side of the contest «Miss and Mister Asia», initially, participants» motivation was enhanced by the leaders of Tomsk diasporic communities and participants pursued similar goals - to honorably represent their country/republic and win. However, despite the general atmosphere of competition, all of them made friends with each other - an observation repeatedly noted during the interviews. Participants» video cards are particularly notable - they can be divided into two categories - the one that used a lot of ethnic symbols and the other that placed an emphasis on other aspects of life, only casually touching upon ethnicity. The study revealed two discourses - that of the similarities and differences stressed by different parties (organizers, participants) and, ultimately, that of the unity, with the boundaries of «Asianness» being quite flexible. The event in question was also considered as a ritual, based on Victor Turner»s theory. Divided into pairs and registered as ethnically marked, the participants, having gone through the stage of liminality (the contest), finally got united and found themselves in a new state designated by us as a discourse of friendship.

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