Lewis Daly Publishes an Ethnography of Makushi Parakari Brewing

In 2019, anthropologist Lewis Daly published an in-depth study of parakari, a cassava beer made by Makushi communities in southern Guyana. Brewers cultivate a Rhizopus mold on cassava, using fungal saccharification before alcoholic fermentation—a technological pathway distinct from malting grain or adding industrial enzymes. Daly treated fermentation as both a technical system and a social and ecological practice. The study is historically valuable because it documents brewers’ knowledge and interpretation of a living Amazonian tradition rather than presenting cassava beer only through an outside recipe or a generalized account of Indigenous alcohol.