He conducted research in the Trobriand Islands and other regions in New Guinea and Melanesia where he stayed for several years, studying indigenous cultures.

Returning to England after World War I, he published his principal work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), which established him as one of Europe's most important anthropologists.

Malinowski's ethnography of the Trobriand Islands described the complex institution of the Kula ring and became foundational for subsequent theories of reciprocity and exchange.

Malinowski, a scion of the Polish szlachta (nobility),[11]: 1013  was born on 7 April 1884 in Kraków, in the Austrian Partition of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – then part of the Austro-Hungarian province known as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria.

[12]: 332  His father, Lucjan Malinowski, was a professor of Slavic philology at Jagiellonian University, and his mother was the daughter of a landowning family.

On 30 May 1902 he passed his matura examinations (with distinction) at the Jan III Sobieski Secondary School, and later that year began studying at the College of Philosophy of Kraków's Jagiellonian University, where he initially focused on mathematics and the physical sciences.

[12]: 332 [14]: 137 While attending the university he became severely ill (possibly with tuberculosis), and while he recuperated his interest turned more toward the social sciences as he took courses in philosophy and education.

[12]: 333  He also spent three semesters at the University of Leipzig (c. 1909–1910), where he studied under economist Karl Bücher and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, and examined the works of anthropologist Heinrich Schurtz.

[12]: 333  Initially Malinowski's journey to Australia was supposed to last only about half a year, as he was mainly planning on attending a conference there, and travelled there in the capacity of secretary to Robert Ranulph Marett.

Malinowski, at risk of internment, nonetheless decided not to return to Europe, and after intervention by a number of his colleagues, including Marett as well as Alfred Cort Haddon, the Australian authorities allowed him to stay in the region and even provided him with new funding.

[12]: 334  During the breaks in between his expeditions he stayed in Melbourne, writing up his research, and publishing new articles, such as Baloma; the Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands.

[12]: 335 In addition to his work in academia, he has been described as a "wittily entertaining pundit" who wrote and spoke in media of the day on various issues, such as religion and race relations, nationalism, totalitarianism, and war, as well as birth control and sex education.

In 1963, in his foreword to its new edition, John Arundel Barnes called it an epochal work, and noted how it discredited the previously held theory that Australian Aborigines had no institution of family.

First published in 1967, covering the period of his fieldwork in 1914–1915 and 1917–1918 in New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands, it set off a storm of controversy and what Michael W. Young called a "moral crisis of the discipline".

[33] Already a year after his death Clyde Kluckhohn described his influence in the field as significant if somewhat controversial, noting that to some he "was a major prophet", and that "no anthropologist has ever had so wide a popular audience".

[12]: 335  Michael W. Young outlined Malinowski's major contributions as the comparative study of concepts of kinship, marriage, the family; magic, mythology, and religion.

[15]: 10 [36][37]: 22 [38]: 74  He stated that the goal of the anthropologist, or ethnographer, is "to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world".

[42] Malinowski in his pioneering[d] research set up a tent in the middle of villages he studied, in which he lived for extended periods of time, weeks or months.

[48]: 1182–1183  His pioneering decision to subsequently immerse himself in the life of the natives represents his solution to this problem, and was the message he addressed to new, young anthropologists, aiming to both improve their experience and allow them to produce better data.

[15]: 10–14 His early works also contributed to scientific study of sex, previously restricted due to Euro-American prudery and views on morality.

Thus, biological needs include metabolism, reproduction, bodily comforts, safety, movement, growth, and health; and the corresponding cultural responses are a food supply, kinship, shelter, protection, activities, training, and hygiene.

[8] To Malinowski, people's feelings and motives were crucial to understanding the way their society functioned, which he outlined as follows:[53] Besides the firm outline of tribal constitution and crystallized cultural items which form the skeleton, besides the data of daily life and ordinary behavior, which are, so to speak, its flesh and blood, there is still to be recorded the spirit—the natives' views and opinions and utterances.Malinowski, in what is considered an important contribution to cross-cultural psychology, challenged the claim, to universality, of Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex.

[42] Malinowski initiated a cross-cultural approach in Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927), demonstrating that specific psychological complexes are not universal.

[14]: 138 [55] In reference to the Kula ring, he later wrote: Yet it must be remembered that what appears to us an extensive, complicated, and yet well ordered institution is the outcome of so many doings and pursuits, carried on by savages, who have no laws or aims or charters definitely laid down.

[40] Malinowski influenced African studies, serving as academic mentor to Jomo Kenyatta, the father and first president of modern Kenya.

[1] Among his students were such future social scientists as Hilda Beemer Kuper,[1][59] Edith Clarke,[1] Kazimierz Dobrowolski,[12]: 335  Raymond Firth,[1] Meyer Fortes,[60]: x  Feliks Gross,[12]: 335  Francis L. K. Hsu,[61]: 13  Phyllis Kaberry,[62] Jomo Kenyatta,[63] Edmund Leach,[64]: 1  Lucy Mair,[1] Z. K. Matthews,[65] Józef Obrębski,[12]: 335  Maria Ossowska,[12]: 335  Stanisław Ossowski,[12]: 335  Ralph Piddington,[66]: 67  Hortense Powdermaker,[1] E. E. Evans-Pritchard,[1] Margaret Read,[1] Audrey Richards,[1] Isaac Schapera,[1] Andrzej Jan Waligórski,[12]: 335  Camilla Wedgwood,[1] Monica Wilson[1] and Fei Xiaotong.

[68]: 1 [69] Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz based a character, Duke of Nevermore, from his novel The 622 Downfalls of Bungo or The Demonic Woman (written in the 1910s but not published until 1972) on Malinowski.

[73] In his youth he was a close friend of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, a Polish artist; this friendship had much impact on Malinowski's early life.