ABSTRACT
This chapter is to bring together some recent interests in the reading and writing ethnographic sociology and anthropology, and to apply one classic mode of analysis to texts of sociology. It intends as part of a rapidly growing literature on the literary and rhetorical devices available to the authors and readers of scholarly texts. The analysis outlined here can in due course be amplified and developed to incorporate, or contrast with, sources of different kinds. In examining a corpus of ethnographic confessions, author use the formal analysis of narratives in the style initiated by the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp in his pioneering work on the morphology of the folk-tale. Propp subjected to analysis a very large number of Russian folk tales, and reduced their variety to a highly restricted set of elementary functions. The chapter deals with 'confessionals' of urban ethnography, rather than those deriving from institutional settings, such as medicine, education, bureaucracies etc.
