Kenelm Oswald Lancelot Burridge was born in Malta in 1922. After spending his childhood in Lucknow, India, he was educated in England, and in 1939 he joined the Royal Navy. Burridge served on the battleships HMS Ramillies and Royal Sovereign in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans until 1942. After that, Burridge transferred to the submarine service. He served aboard HMS Splendid when she was sunk off Naples in 1943, and he was captured. Later that year, he escaped to service in the Far East, retiring as a lieutenant in 1946. Burridge entered Exeter College, Oxford, that year and completed his B.A. in 1948, a diploma in Social Anthropology, the following year, and later his B.Litt. (1950) and M.A. (1952) in Anthropology. He then obtained a Ph.D. in that field from Australian National University in 1954. Burridge has conducted fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Malaya (a research fellow at the University of Malaya), Australia, New Hebrides, and India. In addition, he held teaching posts in anthropology and ethnology at Baghdad University and Oxford before joining UBC as an anthropology professor in 1968.
Burridge's main interests were anthropological history and theory, religion, myth, museology, and missiology. In 1988, Burridge served as a visiting lecturer or professor at the University of Western Australia, Princeton University, and International Christian University in Tokyo until his retirement. He received Killam, Guggenheim, and Canada Council, fellowships. In addition, he was named honorary life fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania, and the Royal Society of Canada.