Approaching media through the senses: Between experience and representation

Over recent years, there has been a growing interest in media and the senses. Yet there has to date been no sustained focus on the implications of existing approaches to the senses in terms of how we understand this relationship. In this article, I demonstrate how contemporary debates rooted in, but by no means exclusive to, anthropology that pivot around concepts of culture, representation and experience can inform the ways we might conceptualise the relationship between media and the senses. This article explores the tensions between and analytical consequences of, on the one hand, culturalist approaches to both the senses and to media and, on the other, phenomenological approaches. Such debates reveal the need to explore further how the relationality between representational and non-representational elements of media and content might be articulated.