PROFILE
 

PhD, The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Anna-Riikka Kauppinen is a sociocultural anthropologist exploring capitalism, finance, and
state-business relations in West Africa, with research interests spanning work and expertise,
fiscal relations, and economic justice and redistribution. Her research aims to understand the
political stakes of capitalist institution-building by centering long-standing questions of the
significance of African ownership of economic infrastructures in contexts of imperial power
and extraction. This aim motivates her first book project titled Counter Capital: Business of
Economic Sovereignty in a West African City, which draws on archival research and
fieldwork among entrepreneurs, young professionals, and privately incorporated banks in
Accra, Ghana. In a city that was historically the global centre for imagining a Pan-African
counter-force to European colonial capital, and where global speculative capital looms large,
the book examines enterprises and banks as political sites to problematize the significance
of Ghanaian capital and entrepreneurial labour, for the ‘national economy’ and beyond.
 

Anna-Riikka is also interested in the interlinkages of religion, economy, and politics. She has
published on the interface of the state, taxation, and Christian faith in Ghana and the
influence of Charismatic Pentecostalism in Ghana’s post-1990s private sector, where
Charismatic Christians work as employees, managers, business consultants, and corporate
board members. Most recently, she has explored Charismatic mega-churches’ financial
investment in Ghanaian enterprises, a research endeavour which she intends to extend to
Nigeria and the West African diaspora. This project analyses the financial eco-system that
Christian business networks generate in West African urban economies. By exploring
financial investment at the interface of churches, the state, enterprises, and popular critique,
the project analyses the inequalities and distributive effects that the global circulation of
financial capital controlled by mega-churches engenders.
 

Alongside, Anna-Riikka is currently developing a collaborative research project on how the
rapid digitalisation of financial services is transforming regulatory frameworks and financial
expertise in mainstream banking institutions across West and East Africa, as they figure out
their place and ‘relevance’ in the near future.

Anna-Riikka trained as an anthropologist at the University of Helsinki, Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam and London School of Economics and Political Science, where she obtained a
PhD in Anthropology in 2018. Prior to joining the Graduate Institute in 2022, she was a
Research Associate at the University of Cambridge (2018-2021), where she was part of the
Max Planck Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change. She was one of the
associate editors of Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society
(2021-2024), and is currently a member of The Anthropology of Tax Network, which
advances anthropological approaches to taxation and fiscal studies.

THEMATIC EXPERTISE
 

• Business, enterprises & corporate responsibility
• Labour & employment
• State-building, sovereignty
• Emerging countries
• Self-determination & minorities
• Markets & international investment
• Economic history
• Globalisation

GEOGRAPHICAL EXPERTISE
 

• Kenya
• Ghana
• Nigeria

Publications
 

Articles and book chapters

• 2025 (forthcoming). “Christianity, Finance, and New Market Experts.” In Grasseni, C., Bähre, E., Holmes, D. Kanters, C. Encyclopedia of Economic Anthropology. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
• 2025 (forthcoming), with Gez, Y.N, Médard, C., Kamara, E., Masese, E., et. al. “Traces of Bilateralism: Collaborative Research on the Afterlives of a Finnish-Kenyan Water Development Project.” The East African Review (forthcoming)2024, with G. Daswani (forthcoming). "Banker, Pastor, Teef: Christian Financial Elites and Vernaculars of Accountability in Ghana". Forthcoming in American Anthropologist
• 2024. “Banker, Pastor, Teef: Christian financial elites and vernaculars of accountability in Ghana,” with Girish Daswani. American Anthropologist 126(3): 408-421.
• 2024. “The Nurturing State: an intimate portrait of becoming a tax-payer in Ghana.” In Anthropology and Tax: Ethnographies of Fiscal Relations, edited by J. Mugler, M. Sheild Johansson, and R. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• 2023. “God’s Delivery State: taxes, tithes and a rightful return in Urban Ghana.” In Beyond The Social Contract: An Anthropology of Tax, edited by N. Makovicky and R. Smith. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books.
• 2022. "Saving the Indigenous Banks: Moral Politics of Economic Sovereignty in Ghana's 2017-2019 Financial Crisis." Africa 92(4): 561-580.
• 2021. “More than money: work as self-realization in Accra's private media.” In Hann, C. (ed.) Work, Society, and the Ethical Self: Chimeras of Freedom in the Era of Neoliberalism. Berghahn Books.
• 2020. "God's Delivery State: Taxes, Tithes, and a Rightful Return in Urban Ghana." Social Analysis 64(2): 38-58.
• 2020. "Citizens for Ghana and the kingdom: Christian personal development in Accra." In Bell, E., Gog, S., Simionca, A. and Scott, T. (eds.) Spirituality, Organization and Neoliberalism: Understanding Lived Experiences, pp. 126-148. Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing.
• 2014, with Spronk, R. “Afro-Chic: beauty, ethics and ‘locks without dread’ in Ghana.” In Jaffe, Rivke and Barendregt, Bart (eds.) Green Consumption: the Global Rise of Eco-Chic. Abingdon & New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Review essays

• 2021. A Research Agenda for Economic Anthropology, edited by James G. Carrier. Cheltenham, United Kingdom & Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019. Anthropology of Work Review 42: 59-60.
• 2020. "God’s Calculative Experiments: Divine Economic Agency in Early Christianity and Anthropological Theory." In New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity Review Forum no. 4, p. 3-7. More info.
• 2019. Long Read: Beyond Debt. Islamic Experiments in Global Finance by Daromir Rudnyckyj. LSE Review of Books, republished in LSE Business Review.

Current research projects

Charismatic Capital: Christian Investment Relations in West Africa

This project explores the financial eco-system that the past 30 years of growth of Charismatic Pentecostal Christianity is generating in West Africa. In Ghana, Charismatic mega-churches have become important ‘clients’ for financial institutions due to the consistent amount of liquid cash they amass on a weekly basis. Thanks to churches’ success in mobilizing revenue for large-scale infrastructural projects, Ghanaian state agents regard them as models for building fiscal institutions. Some mega-churches and pastors have invested financial capital in their congregants’ enterprises, and become shareholders and corporate board members in financial institutions. Tracing how church-held financial capital circulates in the urban economy in Ghana’s capital Accra and Nigeria’s Lagos, this project considers Charismatic churches as key agents of capitalist transformation and enterprise financing.

Barclays Meets Nkrumah: ‘Africanising’ the Banking Sector

This archival project explores the process of ‘africanising’ banking institutions in the immediate post-colonial period in West Africa, focusing on the negotiations between African politicians and British finance professionals employed in Barclays Bank and Standard Chartered. Made possible through access to Barclays Group Archives in Manchester, the UK, the research involves close analysis of travel diaries, letters and official reports that Barclays executives produced during their trips to West Africa since the late 19th century. These documents include, among others, photographs and letters that describe the ritual proceedings of opening new bank branches in Ghana; minutes of meetings between Barclays and political authorities in Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Liberia; as well as situational reports that reveal how Barclays dealt with local demands to ‘africanise’ the banking sector during the wave of decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s. Central to analysing these documents is to identify how the value of the ‘indigeneity of finance’ is reconfigured in encounters between British banks and West African politicians and bank employees.