Religious Entrepreneurship and the Informal Economic Sector

Orisa Worship as 'Service Provider' in Nigeria and the United States

Abstract

This essay examines orisa worship, the indigenous religion of the Yoruba people in Nigeria, and its counterpart in Cuba and the United States, la Regla de Ocha, as a structure of service providers functioning within the informal economic sector. Taking literally Warner (1993) and lannaconne's (1990) model of religion as a free market and drawing from the literature on the
informal economic sector, particularly among immigrant populations, the essay will use the Yoruba religion as a case study to show how this "client" religion (Stark and Bainbridge 1987) forms an active portion of the informal sector among Cuban populations in Houston as well as
indigenous populations in Nigeria. The essay builds on Warner's paradigm by showing that the market aspect of religion need not be thought of as merely an analogy but that discrete religions can function as economic entities.