Nuclear landscape: tourism, embodiment and exposure in the Chernobyl Zone

This article recounts a day-trip to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and the ruined town of Pripyat through a series of ethnographic vignettes from the point of view of a tour guide. This article offers an approach that begins with questions of embodiment, materiality and agency in order to research worldly forces, such as radiation, without reducing them to only matters of language and thought. In responding to these challenges of the radioactive landscape of the Chernobyl Zone and Pripyat, the article offers 'exposure' as a model of subjectification, applicable beyond radioactive landscapes, which is based upon passivity, vulnerability and a foundational relation-with worldly others which exceed our perceptual, representational and bodily capacities. I introduce the work of Merleau-Ponty as a key theorist behind landscape geographies. In particular, the rejection of dualism and distance is shown to be a vital starting point when understanding tourism and guiding in the radioactive landscape of the Zone. Through the crackling and chirruping of the Geiger counter, the halting, careful movements of visitors and my own uncertainties, I illustrate how radiation is first encountered as a bodily exposure; which is only ever apprehended after-the-fact and experienced as vulnerability. I argue that a more passive, vulnerable sense of embodiment is needed than phenomenology provides, for which I bring the work of Irigaray into conversation with recent post-phenomenological work in geography.