first off, I don't refer to indigenous people as "savages," and secondly, I don't regard gift economies or  similar reciprocal networks as "noble" (implying some kind of moral superiority or conscious, righteous refraining from the temptations of bad behaviour).  the question is, are they practical and what problems do they solve?  what I ask myself is how long those cultures endured in their biomes, how healthy the people were, how much or little coercion and control they experienced in daily life;  and some of these answers are accessible from field anthropology, journals of first contact, or living memory.  those answers do not support a Hobbesian view of preindustrial life.

being "made to work as a food producer in a non-capitalistic agrarian economy" is not, in fact, anyone's idea of a good time -- nor did I ever suggest it was.  monocropping and field agriculture do seem to be correlated historically with corvee labour (for both irrigation and monocrop cultivation), taxation, tribute, and control of [usually hard wheat] grain stores by a kind of evolving priest/king caste.  this type of field labour is not an "alternative" to city life -- it's the original basis of city life.  I don't see what is unreasonable about preferring the type of agriculture practised by some N Am indigenes, i.e. "food forest" tending and dense polyculture.  it's a lot less backbreaking labour and it doesn't impoverish the soil, and provides a more varied diet.  it's also quite adequate (modern experiments confirm the extremely high productivity per acre of intensive polyculture) to feed a fairly large population, unlike gatherer-hunter methods which require more hectares per person than we have left.

and yes, the ploughed field is a "bad" form of agriculture in many ways -- "bad" meaning inefficient or spendthrift -- in that it reverses carbon sequestration, and over time impoverishes the soil ecosystems on which all our lives depend.  in combination with industrial equipment, neurotoxins (pesticides) and artificial and longhaul overkill "amendments," it's agricultural suicide.  "bad" and "good" here have everything to do with our long term survival prospects.  our culture will live longer if we don't kill the soil.  that seems to me a working definition of "good".

so the question still remains for me, in what ways have non-imperial, indigenous cultures been more successful in staying power or sustainability than imperial cultures which tend to crash-n-burn regularly (not to mention in personal liberty or democratic decision making traditions) and why?  and what lessons in adaptive behaviour could we learn from them now that the borders of imperial aggression have pretty much run up against each other, i.e. every square mile of the planet's surface is claimed by an imperial core?

is imperialistic behaviour adaptive?  or maladaptive?

"nobility" (or "glory" for that matter) have nowt to do with it.  it's a soft landing I'm hoping for, nothing more.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...