In Barry Lopez's haunting, poetic book about the hyperborean realms, Arctic Dreams, there's a magnificent story about an Inuit family who are washed out to the seas on a calved iceberg. Nothing is heard of them for about 30 years, until one day they rejoin the rest of their tribal group. The reason for their prolonged absence is this: it has taken them this long, on the deserted island where they fetched up, to hunt the seals, narwhals, whales and assorted other fauna, required to provide the skins, the baleen stretchers, the bone needles and the sinewy thread with which to construct a seagoing boat – as soon as it was done they headed home.

There's something about this tale that represents, for me, the quintessence of what I imagine to be the relationship between traditional hunter-gatherer peoples and their world. The Inuit family are simultaneously at the mercy of their environment, and its masters; their capacity to instinctively utilise every available resource is seamlessly united with high levels of forward planning, so that in a situation that would cost anyone not so attuned their lives, they instead go – literally as well as metaphorically – with the flow.

I probably reread Lopez's book about every couple of years. Arctic Dreams is a more or less perfect example of a tendency in my reading towards what can only be described as "comfort savagery". Lying abed, in the heart of a great, pulsing, auto-cannibalising conurbation, the supply chain of which girdles the earth like the monstrous tail of some effluent-belching comet, I find descriptions of how I myself might have lived before the great grainy surplus of the agricultural revolution curiously heartening. After all, what does any kind of reading provide for us if not the opportunity to exercise imaginative sympathy? Others may prefer to will themselves into James Bond's dinner jacket and Aston Martin DB4, but I'd rather slip into a !Kung hunter's penis sheath and heft his hunting spear.

There have been all sorts of comfort reading in my life. (And even more comfy rereading, which is the literary equivalent of slipping on a pair of battered old slippers.) For many years I liked nothing better than to lie down – preferably in low-lying country such as East Anglia – and lose myself in the halting, pained progress of mountain climbers being winched ever-upwards by their own deranged romanticism. This broadened out into an enthusiasm for accounts of polar exploration: what could be finer than being snugly tucked up in the present while a sad bunch of imperialists were getting bitterly fucked-up in the past? They were compelled out for a short walk, while I had voluntarily opted for a long lie-in. But in fact there was an element of my polar flippancy that mingled with more militant reading tendencies.

In particular, Roland Huntford's revisionist accounts of the race for the South Pole – which focused on the superiority of the Norwegians Nansen and Amundsen, and saw this as a function of their willingness to learn from the Inuit – drew me back to reading anthropology, and in particular accounts of vanished or threatened peoples.

In truth, I'd always enjoyed a bit of comfort savagery; it could be elevated and theoretically-inclined – Malinowski, Mauss and The Gift; Levi-Strauss and the kinship structures of the Bororo, Margaret Mead and her Samoan in-betweeners – or impossibly idealised, like Laurens Van der Post's accounts of the !Kung bushmen. In my early 20s I'd hugely enjoyed Colin Turnbull's books The Forest People and The Mountain People, the latter work seemingly refuting the former's idyllic view of musical pygmies dancing through the rainforest, by presenting an ethnographic survey of a Ugandan hill tribe, the Ik, whose carefully woven social fabric unravelled into amorality during two punishing years of drought. In my mid-20s, sojourns in the Central Australian bush coincided with readings of works by Ted Strehlow, whose cataloguing of the Aranda people's sacred songs formed part of the backcloth for Bruce Chatwin's hugely popular The Songlines, a work which is, in many ways, the acme of comfort savagery: at once a celebration of a 40,000-year mystical culture of deep topography, an elegy for its passing, and a satire on its would-be whitefella preservationists. Kicking around Centralia, I both witnessed the initiation ceremonies of genuine – if horribly deracinated – traditional peoples, and was intrigued to learn that the prevailing local consensus was that Chatwin's premature death wasn't the result of Aids but sympathetic magic directed at him because of his revelation in The Songlines of certain sacred knowledge.

It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves. In earlier epochs it was still possible for those in the so-called developed west to look to traditional peoples not with wistfulness or nostalgia, but with the genuine respect borne of perceiving them as a credible threat. Thus the flipside of the decimation wreaked – in part inadvertently – on the first Americans by Cortez, Pissarro et al was the proto-cultural relativism of Montaigne's essay "On the Cannibals", the lineal descendant of which was Rousseau's archetypal "noble savage". But nowadays the truly farouche is but a curl of wood smoke in a hacked about forest clearing: soon it will be dispersed forever by the gritty wind of civilisation. As you read this, languages and their associated lifestyles are being snuffed out, never to be resurrected, while the last few traditional peoples to be contacted are trying on their brand new Hello Kitty T-shirts. This is where Jared Diamond comes in: the comfort savagery writer de nos jours.

Diamond is something of a scientific polymath – physiologist, geographer, ecologist and ornithologist – but he is best known for a series of upper-middle-brow science books, beginning in 1991 with The Third Chimpanzee – that set the advances of Weird society (western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic) firmly within the context of diminishing global diversity, and which argue – gently, lucidly, persistently – that we have much to learn from traditional peoples and their 100-millennia-long experiment in alternative forms of being and doing. Jared's most successful book, Guns, Germs and Steel, was inspired by a conversation he had with a New Guinean friend who trenchantly observed that while he was pretty certain he was just as smart as the eminent professor of Geography at UCLA (a fact which Diamond in no way disputed), he couldn't for the life of him understand why the whitefellas had "all the stuff". In the process of explaining precisely why it is that we have "all the stuff", Diamond brilliantly exposed the suppressed racist premise that lies behind all sorts of Weird thinking: that we are somehow smarter and more able than the losers in the world economy. Guns, Germs and Steel is a book to press on any young person who is about to go out into the world, in the hope of explaining to her or him why we should truly respect cultural diversity.

Diamond's next outing, Collapse, was a series of case histories of failed civilisations – Easter Island and Norse Greenland among them – together with studies of contemporary ones on the brink of ecological collapse. His aim was openly monitory: by seeing where others had gone wrong, particularly in their treatment of the environment, perhaps we could avoid the same fate. I enjoyed Collapse rather less than Guns, Germs and Steel; for my coddling purposes there was rather too much in the way of argufying, and rather too little by way of brilliant descriptive writing about what chaps in penis sheaths get up to with their spears.

Diamond's latest book, The World before Yesterday, synthesises his five decades of experience in the tribal highlands of New Guinea (where he has repaired for seasonal fieldwork as an ornithologist), with a whole range of research findings about our rather more sedentary, saline and increasingly senile lifestyles; his aim being, once again, to encourage us Weird know-alls to accept the retarding social byproduct of our rapid technological advance.

I can't fault Diamond's thesis, nor is he at all starry-eyed about the prelapsarian lifestyle – he has no time for death-by-thorn-scratch, the casual violence meted out to women, or the staggering death rate implicit in tribal warfare. But on the other hand his conclusions are a little too commonsensical for those of us who like our savagery to be comforting: we should try more conflict resolution rather than adversarial justice, we shouldn't impose mandatory retirement (fat chance of that now), and it would be a good idea if we cuddled the kids more. However, by virtue of Diamond's painstaking descriptions of traditional life itself, The World before Yesterday really warms the cockles. Because the truth of the matter is that for those of us tapping on keyboards, stepping on jets, and paying our taxes to the military-industrial-complex, it hardly matters where we source our homespun homilies – they'll still be nought but a sticking plaster on the great festering sore of our Weirdness. Under such circumstances, what we require is palliative literary care – the comfort of merely reading about the wild yonder, and the splendid folk who mastered it, while carrying wilfully on with our own supine dependencies.

• This article was amended on 5 February 2013 to correct the spelling of Margaret Mead's name, from Meade.