Malinowski was the son of Lucjan Malinowski, a professor of Slavic philology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and a linguist of some reputation who had studied Polish dialect and folklore in Silesia. Bronisław Malinowski's mother, Józefa, née Łącka, of a moderately wealthy land-owning family, was highly cultured and a good linguist. Early afflicted by the ill health that dogged him throughout life, Malinowski in his teens traveled extensively in the Mediterranean region with his mother, who was by then widowed. Although his early education was conducted largely at home, he subsequently attended the Jagiellonian University, completing his doctorate in 1908, with highest grade honours in philosophy, with physics and mathematics as subsidiaries. Happening upon Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough, an encyclopaedic treatment of religious and magical practices, Malinowski was enthralled and long afterward traced his enthusiasm for anthropology to it. After contact with the newer psychologies and economics in Leipzig, he came in 1910 to the London School of Economics and Political Science, where anthropology had been recently established as a discipline.

For the next quarter-century Malinowski's career was oriented toward London. A prolific writer, he soon published reinterpretations of Australian Aboriginal data from literature then very popular in anthropological circles. These gained him a reputation and promoted his plans for field research, and in 1914 he was able to go to New Guinea. Six months' work among the Mailu on the south coast produced a monograph that, while lacking theoretical development, was sufficient—along with his study of the Australian family—to earn him a doctor of science (D.Sc.) degree from the University of London in 1916. When he moved to the nearby Trobriand (Trobriander) Islands, where he worked for two years in 1915–16 and 1917–18, Malinowski's talents flowered. Living in a tent among the people, speaking the vernacular fluently, recording “texts” freely on the scene of action as well as in set interviews, and observing reactions with an acute clinical eye, Malinowski was able to present a dynamic picture of social institutions that clearly distinguished ideal norms from actual behaviour. In later publications on ceremonial exchange; on agricultural economics; on sex, marriage, and family life; on primitive law and custom; and on magic and myth, he drew heavily on his Trobriand data in putting forward theoretical propositions of significance in the development of social anthropology. Yet, while very rewarding, his field experience had its strains. Writing in Polish for his own private record, Malinowski kept field diaries in which he exposed very frankly his problems of isolation and of his relations with New Guinea people.

In 1919 Malinowski married Elsie Rosaline Masson, daughter of a professor of chemistry at the University of Melbourne; they had three daughters.

After living in the Canary Islands and southern France, Malinowski returned in 1924 to the University of London as reader in anthropology. He became professor in 1927. As one of the most intellectually vigorous social scientists of his day, Malinowski had a stimulating and wide influence. His seminars were famous, and he attracted the attention of prominent scientists in other disciplines, such as linguistics and psychology, and collaborated or debated with them. Conversant with continental European social theory and especially acknowledging his debt to Émile Durkheim (Durkheim, Émile), Marcel Mauss (Mauss, Marcel), and others of the French sociological school, he rejected their abstract notions of society in favour of an approach that focused more on the individual—an approach that seemed to him more realistic. His functional theory (functionalism), as he himself explained,

Only by understanding such functions and interrelations, he held, can an anthropologist understand a culture. In keeping with his concept of culture as an expression of the totality of human achievement, he examined a wide range of cultural aspects and institutions, challenging existing interpretations of kinship and marriage, exchange, and ritual.

Malinowski was active in sponsoring studies of social and cultural change and participated vigorously in educational programs for administrators, missionaries, and social workers. In the 1930s he became much interested in Africa; was closely associated with the International African Institute; visited students working among Bemba, Swazi, and other tribes in eastern and southern Africa; and wrote the introduction to Jomo Kenyatta's book Facing Mount Kenya (1938), prepared as a diploma thesis under his supervision. (Kenyatta became president of Kenya in 1964.)

In 1938 Malinowski went on sabbatical leave to the United States—which he had already visited in 1926 on a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fellowship, in 1933 as a lecturer at Cornell University, and in 1936 as recipient of an honorary doctor of science degree at the Harvard University tercentenary celebrations. When World War II was declared, being by age and temperament unsuited for direct participation in the war effort, he became Bishop Museum Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, then accepted a tenured appointment there. His teaching career during those last years was less remarkable than before, but he was able to study peasant markets in Mexico in 1940 and 1941 and had plans for a study of social change in Mexican-Indian communities. A great believer in freedom, he had also been actively identified with the Polish partisan cause in the war. In 1940 Malinowski married again, to Anna Valetta Hayman-Joyce, an artist who painted under the name Valetta Swann and who assisted him in his Mexican studies and was primarily responsible for the publication of his Scientific Theory of Culture (1944) and other posthumous works.