Where exactly do you draw the line between "tribes" and proper civilizations? It always annoys me hearing a group be referred to as a "tribe" the same way you'd talk about a couple dozen people in thatch huts, then reading on and finding out there was like 80,000 of them with complex societies, developed cities, etc.

Im starting to suspect the classification is just completely arbitrary and made up

>>17847450 (OP)
>Where exactly do you draw the line between "tribes" and proper civilizations?
It's in the name. "Cives".
Look son, if your city/ies isn't/aren't:
>home of the political units of your governance
>permanent settlement(s)
>your main source of military and economic manpower
>your main source of income
>necessary to the governance or administration of your territory by hosting magistrates or governors
you aren't civilized

>>17847450 (OP)
It largely is. It's why most anthropologists and Historians don't use it anymore.

>>17847450 (OP)
Rome literally was a tribal coalition. It maintained that organization far into the imperial period, even.

>>17847450 (OP)
Civilizations have temporal and geographic permanence and also have a civilizing effect on their surroundings.
Tribes that can come and go across time and space are not civilizations.

>>17847450 (OP)
Tribe originally meant kin or group of closely related families or people with a common origin.

A tribe can be pastoral, nomadic, agricultural, maritime, urbanized or even industrial as long as it's based around said basic unit of social cohesion

>>17847450 (OP)
Read Herder

>>17847450 (OP)
A tribe is just a type of social organization, it doesn't have anything to do with how civilized the people are. Arabs are a tribal people yet they're very civilized.

>>17847450 (OP)
>Im starting to suspect the classification is just completely arbitrary and made up

As >>17847490 says, it often is and most actual archeologists, anthropologists, etc avoid the terms now due to their baggage (said baggage basically being "any society that's not european, near eastern, or asian = tribe")

That said, as used by actual researchers in publications, they tended to try to quantify and define them still rather then having it be totally arbitrary, such as by the urban density and function of population centers, how many hierarchical tiers of administrative decision-making their governments had, and so on. For example, since you posted a photo of Teotihuacan and are implicitly alluding to how dumb it is that people call Mesoamerican civilizations "tribes", you can look up the paper "Primary State Formation in Mesoamerica", and see how it tries to draw a line in the sand between earlier chiefdoms and what should count as the region's first true city-state/kingdom.

It's just even those metrics being selected over other metrics is, itself, arbitrary and singling out specific things as being more important then others. So, again, most researchers are trying to move away from doing that, or at least using less baggage-ridden terms when evaluating those same metrics.