ABSTRACT
The dialectics of social life, especially those involved in the endeavor of women to assert their equality with men, has been a major theme in the anthropology of Robert F. Murphy. Female circumcision or clitoridectomy, called by the Mossi, the Bongo, is another of the not too subtle mechanism of Mossi women to challenge the superiority of men. The dialectic is that women or other subordinate groups, faced with the often calculated indifference of their social superiors at attempts to gain equality, often accused the latter of being responsible for their behavior in the first place. Both Robert and Yolanda Murphy dropped the veil in Women of the Forest, to reveal that among the Mundurucu the women were often the original dialecticians. They pointed out that women never really lost the knowledge about the karoko, the sacred and secret trumpets, the supposed symbols of wisdom and male ascendancy, which men bragged about having purloined from them.
