This article examines the ethnocultural codes through which national identity is constructed in the prose of the American Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday (House Made of Dawn, The Way to Rainy Mountain) and the Karakalpak writer T. Kayipbergenov (The Legend of Maman-biy). Applying a comparative-typological method, the study identifies six recurrent code types shared by both authors — ritual and sacred space, naming and genealogy, landscape and toponymy, orally transmitted narrative embedded within the written text, material culture and dress, and religious syncretism — and shows how each writer transforms these codes according to the individual or collective nature of the identity being represented. The results suggest that ethnocultural coding functions in Momaday primarily to reconstruct an individual consciousness fractured by colonial displacement, while in Kayipbergenov it functions to construct a continuous collective memory of a small nation caught between two empires.

ethnocultural code, identity, N. Scott Momaday, T. Kayipbergenov, ritual, oral tradition, comparative literature, Karakalpak literature, Native American literature.

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