To Be Friends with Evil: Invasiveness and Gore Kinship in a Multi-Species Fish Ethnography

Abstract (English)

This ethnography explores the human relationships with Lagocephalus sceleratus, an invasive pufferfish on the island of Crete in Greece, through the lens of "gore kinship"—a necropolitical mode of relating that demands the subjugation or extermination of "undesirable" species as a precondition for coexistence. Problematizing the underlying privilege of posthumanist calls for multispecies kinship (Haraway, Tsing), the presentation discusses how Cretan fishermen, scientists, and para-state actors mobilize violent strategies—from state-sanctioned culling to vigilante massacres—to manage the fish’s ecological and economic threats. The pufferfish, deemed "uncharismatic" and parasitic, disrupts local livelihoods, dismantles fishing gear, and resists commodification, inciting a consensus across rational (scientific, policy) and cosmological (indigenous) worldviews that it must be annihilated. Through fieldwork with fishermen who mutilate puffers to induce cannibalism, inventors developing sonic extermination devices, and policymakers advocating toxin harvesting, the paper interrogates the limits of affirmative kinship theories, arguing that proximities with the "enemy" legitimize necropolitical violence. Gore kinship, as both practice and discourse, underscores the antagonistic undercurrents of human-animal relations, challenging romanticized multispecies ethics and demanding ethnographic reckonings with complicity, privilege, and the necropolitical governance of "invasive" life.