Once in place the fictions were institutionalized by courts, tribute payments, lower native officials, land records, and public works, structuring that part of native life that involved contact with the state. A “people” originally conjured out of whole cloth by administrative fiat might come to adopt that fiction as a conscious, even defiant, identity. In Caesar’s evolutionary scheme, described earlier, tribes preceded states. Given what we now know, it would be more accurate to say that states preceded tribes and, in fact, largely invented them as an instrument of rule.
