Long story short, Fantasy Counterpart Culture is what you get when an author takes a real-life nation and makes a fantasy culture very similar. Classic examples follow:
J.R. Tolkien based the Shire on rural England, and gave the hobbits the attitudes and beliefs of rural Englishmen so that his target readers can better relate to them.
David Eddings, in the Belgariad, based Sendars on Englishmen from the High Middle Ages (by then, Englishmen were a mongrel combination of Celtic, Saxon, Scottish, Danish and Norman). He also based Mimbrate Arends on Norman French, Ulgos on Jews, Chereks on Vikings, Algars on Cossacks, and the Angaraks on Mongols and other East Asian peoples.
Avatar the Last Airbender had four distinct nations, plus several noteworthy subcultures. The Air Nomads are Tibetan/Chinese, the Water Tribes are Inuit, the Earth Kingdom is Qing Dynasty China, and the Fire Nation is Tang Dynasty China mixed with Imperial Japan. Kyoshi Island is based on isolationist Japan, the Sun Warriors are Incas, and the Foggy Swamp Tribe is based on natives of South America and the Mississippi river delta.
My favorite example, though, is Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time. For the most part, I like it because it defies the traditional practice of making exact duplicates of individual cultures by mixing and matching bits and pieces of different cultures.
Here's a quote straight from TV Tropes:
# Robert Jordan's The Wheel Of Time does this a lot. Cairhien is a mix of France and Japan; Amadicia is modeled after Puritan America; the Seanchan have even more similarities to Japan than the Cairhienin do; Illian is a lot like Venice but its people have Greek-sounding names; Andor is similar to England and parts of the U.S.; the Aiel bear Indian and Native American similarities; Tairens have much in common with Spaniards... and the list goes on.
* Wheel Of Time is actually pretty good at this. While they have definite elements taken from different cultures they are very rarely actual Fantasy Counterpart Cultures. The Seanchan are as much Ottoman Empire as they are Japan, and with all sorts of other bits thrown in.
o Word Of God decided to muddle it even more, when Robert Jordan said that the Seanchan have a Texan accent, the Illianers a dutch accent, the Aiel a Slavic accent, among others.
o Furthermore, since the world of the Wheel Of Time is meant, in-universe, to be the distant future of our own world, it makes perfect sense that the cultures therein would retain traits recognizable to the reader.
o The Wheel Of Time is set more than 3,000 years in the future, probably even more than 6,000; the Age of Legends must have lasted thousands of years itself for people to forget the meanings of war and swords. Any similarities to modern cultures should be very thin indeed; how many people today fit the national stereotypes of Mesopotamians?
o All of us?
I laughed a ton at the last part. Oh, and now whenever I read a book from Wheel of Time, I have to try really hard to imagine the Seanchan speaking with a Texan accent. HILARIOUS!
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