The trained ethnographer engages and shares the lifeworld of participants with a sustained and methodical attention to their present experience and life-trajectories. This participant observation is at the core of ethnographic fieldwork and the collection of local text-and-talk is central to linguistic and cultural analysis. Linguistics pairs with participant observation a set of reliable and replicable analytic techniques and conceptual frameworks for carefully describing and analyzing the social and cultural talk-and-text through which people pursue their projects, reflect on their experience, and live their lives. In this course we examine the seminal and contemporary literature on ethnography, acquire the habitus of participant observation, explore methods of confecting and curating observational records and recordings, and practice linguistic-discursive analysis of those records. As one of a number of foundational courses in qualitative data analysis in the social sciences, the course requires no previous experience and is appropriate for the entire range of social science disciplines. However, students are encouraged to come to the course with particular projects or areas of interest in mind.