Well, I suppose that it matters what your frame of reference is. If you read Cortes's first letters to Emperor Charles V, you can see how impressed he was with Tenochtitlan, compared to his native Extremadura, for example.
There was a basic similarity between early sixteenth century Iberian and Mesoamerican society that held the conquered areas together. Call it tribal if you will, but helping out your family and those who were linked with you by patronage of different kinds was working in both societies before the Conquest. So was organized religion, and an aging Aztec noble witnessing the first autos-da-fe in Mexico City later in the century may have seen something familiar that reminded him of the days of his youth.
The more successful conquest cultures (defined as what comes about after an area is militarily conquered) have worked because they played off of the similarities that people found between themselves and their new overlords and vice versa. Or at least they thought that what they were doing was understood by the other side. James Lockhart has done interesting studies for this in Mexico if you are interested, working through Nahua-language documents for what he called "mutual misunderstandings" IIRC.
I think that ultimately a lot of societies are tribal at their core, in fact in one way or another all of them are. Depending on how far you're willing to push the definition. You could say without too much license that feudalism and indeed absolutism was pretty tribal with its focus on dynasty and how early modern absolutists considered their empires the patrimony of a certain dynasty.
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