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Essentially Anthropology is the empirical and comparative study of human societies (people) and their cultures (understandings), with special emphasis upon the processes of evolution of the human condition.
Anthropologists have traditionally been interested in how human societies adapted not just to their natural environments but also to each other and to themselves.
Traditional subdivisions of the field have included archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics (now a separate discipline), and a somewhat amorphous fourth category incorporating social, cultural, and psychological anthropology (and including such specialized sub-fields as political anthropology and linguistic anthropology, the cross-cultural study of religion, and so on).
Traditionally socio-cultural anthropologists have used ethnography (participant and first-hand field observation) as their principal data source and have been particularly concerned with societies having little documentation of a traditional historical kind, hence particularly with tribal and peasant societies. Today it has expanded to larger-scale societies, but still making use of the methods of participant observation honed in the study of small-scale societies.
Anthropology has always had broad areas of overlap with other disciplines, such as folklore, cognitive science, biology, medicine, and especially history. The anthropological contribution to all these fields is inevitably a strong comparative perspective, field observations, and data from understudied societies.
The Department of Anthropology at UCSD originally included only cultural, social, linguistic, and psychological anthropology, and became known especially for its concentration of faculty with interests in psychological issues. (It is absurd to speak of human behavior without considering motivation, which is inherently psychological, but non-psychological departments somehow try to do it. I have never understood that.)
We later expanded the department's focus with the appointment of faculty in biological anthropology and archaeology. Undergraduate and graduate concentrations are available in each of these subfields in addition to our degrees in general anthropology.
There is a slick new Department Web Page (complete with wee print and drop-down menus) containing general informational material (partly duplicating the catalog), plus links to Email addresses and web sites of faculty, staff, and Ph.D. students and alumni. The one-time anthro club web site is updated only when they have a web master, which doesn't always happen.