There was a Monday Methods post on this very topic. I think /u/Ahalenia's post about the term 'tribe' as applied to Native American communities is very relevant to what you are asking. Also, /u/Aerandir's and /u/Tiako's posts about what the term signifies in archaeological/anthropological writings about Germanic and Roman communities.

/u/Khosikulu and I also wrote posts about why the term is very troublesome in African contexts and why scholars of Africa shy away from using the term.

I also took part in an episode of the AskHistorians podcast where I referenced Morton Freid's book The Notion of Tribe, and rubbished the whole notion of "tribes". My written post in that thread also has a lot of recommendations for further reading about the topics of ethnicity, nationalism, and social complexity in African contexts.

Edit- one thing that I failed to mention in the Podcast is Morton Fried's characterization of "tribes as a secondary phenomenon". That is, non-state societies which come in contact with expanding states. Fried provides an example of Tang and Ming China in contact with Mongol and Turkic people in central asia. In that scenario, the Chinese administrations misunderstood the social relations of these Mongol and Turkic peoples and categorized them as tribes, dealing with them as such. This conferred immense political power on individual actors among these Mongol and Turkic people, and changed social relations in ways that conformed with these Chinese misunderstandings.

Thus, Chinese contact with Mongols or Turks created tribes, rather than tribes being a "natural" phenomenon.

I think you can compare that to what Aidan Southall and John Illiffe were saying about colonial designation of "tribes" in Tanzania creating new identities.

There's much more to be said and precised about it, but you'd probably be interested looking at these previous answers ( u/depanneur, u/Libertat, u/ProserpinasEdge)