Maps make messes.  Maps can also be used to mop messes up.  Consider the apparent cleanliness of colonial mapping: missionaries and mapmakers often willfully exclude indigenous populations from cartographic depictions of 'unknown' north america, leaving pristine, clean white where the 'mess' we'd rather not see resides (Brealey, 1995; Harris, 2002; Law, 2004).
Counter-mapping is a method of upsetting such carefully constructed blank slates.  Even where local resources are included on maps, those who depend directly on those resources may not be made apparent.  When those local folks make known their presence on the land, through the use of maps, they are engaged in counter-mapping (Peluso, 1995).
Thus, counter-mapping is not merely a means of asserting difference (though it is certainly that as well).  Counter-mapping is a means of securing livelihood, survival, and continuity.  As an argument, counter-mapping is much like a 'turning of the tables' in philosophy-speak.  It is at the same time proactive, positive, and complete.  This method of cleaning house, of acknowledging everything 'that is there,' will brook no half-measures.  The map must also be made by those 'who are there' and have been for millenia and prior to state- and corporate- inscribed lines.  Such is the nature of the map-making enterprise.
Paradoxically, then, as a method, the map is a double-edged sword.  It is a depiction of interest, but interest that is selfish, that is not completely forthcoming.  The power of the map corrupts and it does so precisely at the place where it would like to stay silent.  Maps speak of power, of those in power, in government, in resource extraction, exploration.  Power and its interests are prime suspects in the cartographic search for spatial recidivism.  Contrary to popular image, those on the ground, the indigenous, the local, or those who were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time, are, as usual, the folks most forced to adapt, adopting the map to keep from towing the lines, the spaces, and the points of interest that try to keep them out in the cold.
References:
Brealey, K. (1995). Mapping Them 'Out': Euro-Canadian Cartography and the Appropriation of the Nuxalk and Tsilhqot'in First Nations' Territories, 1793-1916. The Canadian Geographer, 39(2), 140-156.
Harris, C. (2002). Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London and New York: Routledge.
Peluso, N. (1995). Whose Woods Are These? Counter-Mapping Forest Territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia. Antipode, 27(4), 383-406.