The assessment of heritage, made before any conservation process, is the subject of this paper, which proposes how this assessment becomes part of a major sociocultural phenomenon that can be modeled with Bourdieu’s field of power theory. Heritage is defined as a cultural produce that is obtained from the interpretation of past and culture, which is made by experts, transmitted by institutions and assimilated by people as part of a legitimizing discourse about a culture that is often hegemonic. We analyze some alternatives to this model and emphasize the need to rethink heritage from the capacity of people to make new interpretations, and not only as a function of hegemonic groups. This goes against one of the fundamentals of the heritage concept: its role as an identity constructor.