In his final year of high school from 1963-64 he was an American Field Service exchange student in Detmold, Germany where he attended Leopoldinum II Gymnasium.

[2] For 34 years previous to his appointment in Minnesota he was Professor of Anthropology; Theatre, Speech and Dance; and East Asian Studies at Brown University.

In Iran, this includes the Iranian ritual passion drama, ta'ziyeh and the comic improvisatory theatre tradition, ru-howzi.

(see Persian theater) He has also studied traditional performance in Japan, China and South Asia.

[10] An admirer of the late anthropologist, Margaret Mead, Beeman has edited seven volumes of her post-World War II papers, having written scholarly introductions for several of them, including The Study of Culture at a Distance,[11] and Understanding Ourselves: Theory and Method in the Anthropology of Contemporary Western Society.