Drawing on Nelson Goodman's constructivist approach, this article argues that debates in the anthropology of art about aesthetics detract from important questions concerning the constitution of cultural diversity and the social role of categories. The claim that aesthetics is embedded in broader situations of social practice over-emphasizes cultural purity and authenticity, while the counter-claim that aesthetic experience constitutes a separable, transcendental and universal realm denies the sociocultural construction of reality. These arguments are usually applied to material objects, but here, the example of Javanese performance traditions, which include varieties of experience both more or less than 'aesthetic', is used to suggest that indigenous discourses of art are not necessarily self-sufficient and discrete. Rather, these discourses need to be set in a historical context so as to show the political significance of aesthetics and of the category of art. The neologism 'aesthemics' could assist anthropological explorations in this field.
