The account of the introduction and development of anthropology in Vietnam crosses and embodies the events of the twentieth century in a surprising way. Starting from a colonial history in which Southeast Asia, a much larger region that does not coincide but rather includes the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and passing through the World Wars, decolonisation and the Cold War, Vietnam is at the centre of a complex trajectory of cultural narratives, policies and ethnographic self-representations difficult to trace back to a single and linear story. In this chapter, the work on the sources includes archives of the various cultural institutions founded in colonial times by France in Indochina, a period in which anthropology overlaps and joins archaeology; it then collects the testimonies of the first Vietnamese anthropologists who, although trained at the French school, distinguished themselves in nationalist roles during the times of the Indochina War; they include the divergent and highly politicised narratives of the two decades of the division of the country (1955–1975), a complex phase to be reconstructed due to the objective decrease in anthropological research and the scarcity of digital sources relating to the ethnography of the Soviet period.