Hi,
Thanks for the suggestion. It turns out that the issue with lsusb not working was due to the fact that the Edison was not in USB OTG mode. When rebooting in USB OTG mode with a USB hub attached, lsusb works as expected.
I still cannot get libnfc configure to find libusb though.
I tried to build libusb (libusb-1.0.9), and it ran without any errors (configure && make && make install && ldconfig), but the configure script in libnfc still cannot find libusb:
checking for libusb... no
checking for libusb... no
checking for libusb-config... no
checking usb.h usability... no
checking usb.h presence... no
checking for usb.h... no
configure: error: The libusb headers are missing