Culture is a system of information and behavior learnable through knowledge.

Evidence

Burton’s most extraordinary characteristic is, I believe, that he was preternaturally knowledgeable about the degree to which human life in society was governed by rules and codes. All of his vast information about the Orient, which dots every page he wrote, reveals that he knew that the Orient in general and Islam in particular were systems of information, behavior, and belief, that to be an Oriental or a Muslim was to know certain things in a certain way, and that these were of course subject to history, geography, and the development of society in circumstances specific to it. Thus his accounts of travel in the East reveal to us a consciousness aware of these things and able to steer a narrative course through them: no man who did not know Arabic and Islam as well as Burton could have gone as far as he did in actually becoming a pilgrim to Mecca and Medina. So what we read in his prose is the history of a consciousness negotiating its way through an alien culture by virtue of having successfully absorbed its systems of information and behavior. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 498

Categorization

• XREF: This reconceives culture as a learnable code system, prefiguring later work on Islam as a structured knowledge system that the Islamophobia readings will build on; also echoes Bourdieu’s habitus as embodied codes. — connects to: Value is constituted by knowledge and practice, not merely hype. — Kean Birch, Rethinking Value in the Bio-economy:…, 95
• DEFINE: Defines Oriental knowledge as mastery of an alien culture’s systems of information and behavior.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 498