If economic logic can be used to understand the use of zombies then the idea of the market for healing is a useful means for understanding how people choose healers, modes of healing and therapies. In this chapter I use the abstract idea of ‘the market’ as a way of thinking about how people conceive and transact values relating to health and healing in this small town. The market for healing described here includes a range of options. Some degree of informed choice is required. It is possible, then, to understand healing not so much as a ‘search’ or ‘quest’ for ‘therapy’ (Janzen 1978) but as the ‘infrastructures of information’ (Ozden-Schilling 2016) where every kind of cure, therapy or healing is, as Julie Livingstone says, ‘improvised’ (2012). Richard Werbner (2015: 169) speaks of diviners’ clients in the small village of Moremi in the Tswapong Hills, Central District, Botswana, ‘shopping’ or even ‘jockeying’ for their desired outcomes. ‘Clients go back and forth from one diviner to another’ or ‘turn to distant diviners, not merely for a special occasion or a crisis, but sometimes routinely’.

This market is governed less by price than by a parallel market for belief, for while healing and being healed are values that have a market, it is not always possible to evaluate the effectiveness, utility or economic efficiency (value for money) of any healing process. Thus it is difficult to establish a price for healing where ‘price’ can be defined as what sufferers are willing to trade for what they believe might help them. The efficacy of healing is partly contingent upon knowledge and belief that contribute to the placebo (or its negative twin, nocebo) effect; therefore, the efficiency of this ‘market’ is uncertain. But, as Livingstone writes in Improvising Medicine, her study of a cancer ward in Botswana, ‘care proceeds amid uncertainty in contexts of relative scarcity’ (2012: 6). Livingstone uses the cancer ward as ‘a metaphor for and an instantiation of the constellation of bureaucracy, vulnerability, power, biomedical science, mortality and hope that shape the early twenty-first- century experience in southern Africa’ (2012: 8).