Enacting nostalgia: Singing during the last dinner of a winter housing scheme for migrants

This article presents the results of an ethnographic study conducted in an emergency shelter for migrants in Paris, managed entirely by volunteers from the charity Solidarité Saint Bernard. The research explores how this shelter, sustained by the surrounding neighbourhood, cultivates a hospitable milieu that enables new arrivals to settle and participate in shared social life. At the heart of this dynamic is the practice of commensality: daily communal dinners that structured the shelter’s operations and embodied a collective effort to foster coexistence. Drawing on various ethnographic materials I focus on one particularly resonant moment: the singing of the guests during the final dinner of the season. Singing, understood primarly as a corporeal expression, sheds light on how shared meals enable participants to access emotional registers of nostalgia, thereby reaffirming intimate attachments. Far from being solely an act of charitable food provision, these shared meals reveal a more complex social support system – one rooted in neighbourhood solidarity, lived experience and the embodied enactment of hospitality. In sum, this research examines the material and affective conditions under which such expressions become possible in the context of migration.