The meaning of “cross-cultural aesthetics” is ambiguous. It may mean the admiration of the artistic forms (such as performance, literature, or painting) of another culture or an area of inquiry into the nature of aesthetic appreciation across different cultures. This ambiguity has led to significant debates within anthropology concerning the suitability of the category of aesthetics as a field of inquiry. Anthropologists have argued that the category of aesthetics is required to explain the existence of ornamentation and the emergence of artistic forms, and in order to explore the qualitative features of material culture and its connection to cultural forms. However, anthropologists are divided between, on the one hand, the position that all people have aesthetic experience and that all cultures have some kind of art and, on the other, the position that art and aesthetic appreciation are specific to Western societies.