Mapping semantic bias in UNESCO intangible heritage metadata through community detection in South America

UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists operate as global classificatory infrastructures that shape cultural visibility. Focusing on South America, this study models UNESCO’s primary and secondary descriptors as co-occurrence networks and examines their community structure and representational diversity. Using Louvain modularity and Shannon entropy, we identify thematic concentrations that disproportionately position Andean countries within ritual and devotional clusters, while Brazil and Colombia exhibit higher semantic diversity across communities. Cross-network analysis of associations between primary and secondary descriptors reveals systematic pairings, such as Procession with Religious syncretism, that expose tensions between institutional categories and local epistemologies. These findings provide quantitative evidence of semantic bias embedded in UNESCO’s metadata ontology and show how network-based methods can support critical evaluations of heritage infrastructures. By making the internal structure of UNESCO’s controlled vocabulary visible, this work contributes to debates on cultural representation, metadata governance and the epistemic consequences of digital heritage classification.