ABSTRACT
Yet, in local beauty pageants audiences apply a distinctive set of criteria when choosing the winner. As in many towns, these pageants constitute performance forms organized and produced within the context of a festival. Like other festival activities, they provide an arena for voicing underlying conflicts and tensions affecting the community. In such a context, the pageant is best understood as a local adaptation, a refashioning of a dominant cultural form to the particular needs for representation within the community.
