Given the ethnographic thrust of this book, one could be forgiven for thinking that events and experiences are solely what constitute reality on the Bridgetown Estate. The lay narratives and practices of residents are undoubtedly critical in that they provide a window into a world, as it were. But I want to build on and to explore the meaning of these ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz, 2017) of everyday phenomena and practices, and also to add to and even challenge the ethnographic perspective as possessing the whole or sole truth, as it were. It is perhaps worth reiterating Sayer's (2000, p 149) point from Chapter 1, when he says, ‘Grasping the whole is more difficult than grasping what happens next in the story.’ In the move from such manifest phenomena to generative structures things are perhaps not as obvious as they appear. Culture and structure, or, to put it another way, the episodic and the configurational (Sayer, 2000, pp 142– 143) are dialectically related in that practices of Bridgetown residents have roots, and perhaps make sense only in the context of their grounding and placement within social structure (Yeung, 1997; De Cocteau, 2012). This relationship between social action and (the reproduction or transformation of) social structure is outlined by Bhaskar (2009, p 133), working from a transcendental criticalrealist perspective, in the following way: