metaphysics versus narrative, stable essentials versus the progress of a story. With this in mind, we should expect the structuralists to struggle with origins more than vocationalists. We often mistake the way things are for the way things have always been. Origins is important because it unsettles this conflation, forcing us to tease out how things became the way we now find them. Similar difficulty is encountered in their understanding of severe mental disability, which challenges the all-or-none