Iranian Journal Of Antheropology

Iranian Journal Of Antheropology

The Political-Social Economy of Pollution: A Critical Ethnography of Industrial Development in Sarv Village

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors
Faezeh Mohabbati 1
Moosa Anbari 2
Ahmad Firouzabadi 3
1 Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology of Rural Social Development, Department of Social Development, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
2 Professor, Department of Social Development, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
3 Associate Professor and Faculty Member, Department of Social Development, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
10.22034/jasi.2026.2095573.1658
Abstract
Industrial development in rural Iran has often been presented through employment, investment, production, and regional growth, while the everyday experience of communities living beside large industrial complexes has received less attention. This article examines how residents of Sarv, a village in Ardakan County, Yazd Province, experience living alongside industrial development. The study is necessary because industrial transformation has altered livelihoods, resources, environmental conditions, health concerns, local power relations, and patterns of belonging. The main research question is: How do residents of Sarv experience and interpret coexistence with industrial development? Two subsidiary questions address changes in livelihood, employment, and health, and how power relations shape the distribution of development’s benefits and costs and residents’ responses. The study uses critical ethnography and is based on ten months of fieldwork between October 2024 and July 2025. Data were generated through participant observation, in-depth and semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, and field notes, and were coded and analyzed in Atlas.ti. The findings show that industry occupies an ambivalent position in village life. It provides employment, income security, opportunities to remain in the village, and new economic possibilities, while also being associated with water degradation, air pollution, dust from concentrate and iron particles, concerns about illness, changes in agriculture, and social transformation. Residents’ responses do not form a unified opposition to industry. They move among protest, negotiation, claims for compensation and Sarvices, persistence, accommodation, and attempts to redefine relations with industrial actors. Industrial migration has also unsettled boundaries between local and newcomer, Shi‘i and Sunni, and Iranian and Afghan, especially in the village school. The article develops the concept of a political-social economy of pollution to show how pollution becomes embedded in livelihood dependence, institutional relations, moral claims, local power, and everyday practices. Pollution therefore cannot be understood only as a physical externality of industrial production; it is also socially organized, politically negotiated, and incorporated into the conditions through which people continue to live.
Keywords
Critical ethnography
In-betweenness
Industrial development
Political-social economy of pollution
Resistance
Subjects
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Iranian Journal Of Antheropology
Volume 23, Issue 42 - Serial Number 42
September 2026
Pages 291-316