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. “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.