Solidarity and Mutual Assistance in Low-income Communities: Everyday Practices to Overcome Scarcity and Improve Quality of Life, Recife, Brazil

This article discusses how poor people in Recife, in the northeast of Brazil, deal with everyday difficulties, using solidarity and the gift as resources to cope with needs which are extensive given the insufficiency and ineffectiveness of public policy, and how these practices and feelings are related to quality of life. Solidarity is structured according to the tripartite obligation to give, receive and reciprocate, on which the system of the gift is based. Knowledge of how such relations are established may help strengthen the organic and more sustainable forms that the excluded discover to achieve quality of life for themselves.