ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches the multivocality of heritage as a social and material process by exploring the voices involved in renovating a heritage building. It focuses on the disagreements and negotiations between bureaucrats and property developers and how their voices became (temporarily) harmonious with each other and with the qualities of the building. This process is referred to as multivocal negotiations, which is this chapter’s hermeneutic point of departure. This concept underlines that the outcome of renovation and restoration projects needs to be ethnographically analysed to capture the minute details of the heritage process at a grounded level. The chapter discusses multivocality with reference to an emerging body of ethnographically driven anthropological literature on the complexities of heritage management processes. It critically reflects on the view of heritage as a top-down and inherently immaterial process. The chapter proposes a focus on the affordances of heritage to capture the contextualised and multivocal properties of heritage.
