Journalists and others call it "tribal" I think because they've learned somewhere that the societies we anthropologists think of as tribal (mostly small-scale horticulturalists and pastoralists) are always warring against each other, which of course they rarely do except in very special circumstances. Steven Pinker has exacerbated the problem by bleating about how much more peaceful we are now that we have large nation-states to keep our demons under control.
Incidentally, I feel the same way about the gross misuse of "theory." This past year I actually heard Ira Flatow on NPR's Science Friday ask a physicist "when does a theory become a fact?" I meant to email him but never did....
For me, "tribal" yields an admittedly somewhat fuzzy set of social and cultural features which set these sociocultural "systems" apart from larger-scale systems of the sort that Friedman was referencing. Maybe one of the most important is the distinction between small-scale shamanistic/communalistic religious cults and the larger-scale ecclesiastical cults at the center of mideastern conflict. Social fusion/fission plays a part in these conflicts. This is suggested by violence between Christian cults (Northern Ireland), islamic cults (Middle East etc.), and so on all over the place. They had fusion forced on them by external colonial powers, now they're striving for fission to preserve what they see as their identity.
So maybe the Social Imperative is at the heart of it all. SI promotes fusion, but too much fusion provokes crowding stress, and SI responds with fission?
Incidentally, I feel the same way about the gross misuse of "theory." This past year I actually heard Ira Flatow on NPR's Science Friday ask a physicist "when does a theory become a fact?" I meant to email him but never did....
